Theatre review: The Height of the Storm

After premiering in Bath and Richmond, The Height of the Storm is the latest Florian Zeller play to make it to the West End, with director Jonathan Kent taking a risk on putting two notoriously difficult actors on stage together. The vague description in the publicity suggests another rather dark, sad journey into confusion and failing mental health, and while I’m generally a fan of cheerier things, where this writer is concerned I’d rather see him return to intimate tragedies than the so-so farces of his lighter side. Anne (Amanda Drew) and Elise (Anna Madeley) have gone to their parents’ home in the French countryside for the weekend; it soon becomes apparent that one of their parents has recently died, but Zeller deals in confusion and it’s hard to figure out which one, as both André (Jonathan Pryce) and Madeleine (Eileen Atkins) appear on stage regularly.

André is a famous writer, and Anne has been asked by his publisher to go through his diaries and fragments for anything that could be of interest; could André be dead, and the conversations we see between him and his daughter be a staging of her discovering his thoughts in his writing?

But a lot of the scenes contradict this, suggesting that it’s actually Madeleine who’s dead, and that as he descends into senility André hasn’t quite understood this fact. So what about the scenes where Madeleine is alone with one of her daughters, without André’s point of view filtering the story? Zeller’s The Father and The Mother were constructed like puzzles, the solution to which was clear once it became apparent we were viewing events through confused minds that weren’t necessarily seeing a linear narrative or the facts exactly as they were. This is sort of what’s happening here, but instead of a single distorted viewpoint we’re also getting a mix of genuine memories, the revelations in the diaries, and things as seen by the two daughters.

As a result The Height of the Storm doesn’t resolve itself quite as neatly as its predecessors into a moment where we see the whole picture, but its story does build up enough that you’re not left wondering what it was you just watched. And while we do get varying perspectives we mostly still get that of someone with dementia interspersed with lucid periods. So Lucy Cohu and James Hillier’s characters are credited only as “Woman” and “Man” despite having names – this is because André starts to conflate them with other people from his past.

Recycling as it does certain aspects of The Father without the simplicity of that play, The Height of the Storm doesn’t quite deliver the gut-punch the playwright’s been capable of before, but Kent’s production is moving nonetheless; Pryce has the showier role as André’s world constantly reconfigures itself around him and he tries to keep up, but Atkins is just as importantly someone who can provide a contrast as the steady, unflinching anchor to their relationship. Taken on its own this is an effective and moody evening – on Anthony Ward’s askew country house set, Hugh Vanstone’s lighting shifts to illustrate different takes on reality – but in the context of his other work it does start to look like Zeller is working with a fairly limited skill set, albeit one he’s very adept with. With his upcoming The Son billed as part of a trilogy with The Father and The Mother, I’m interested to see if the writer does actually have any new tricks up his sleeve.

The Height of the Storm by Florian Zeller in a version by Christopher Hampton is booking until the 1st of December at Wyndham’s Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning.