Theatre review: The Son

The Son is being advertised as the final installment in a trilogy of Florian Zeller plays that began with The Father and continued with The Mother; apart from the obvious connection in the titles there isn't, to me, a link that The Height of the Storm couldn't lay equal claim to. If not more so, because while all four are about families dealing with one person's deteriorating mental health The Height of the Storm, like the first two in the series, features a narrative that dips in and out of that fractured mind, putting the audience on the back foot. If The Son's narrative is also meant to be unreliable that's not apparent, though, as we appear to be seeing what the other characters can when 17-year-old Nicolas (Laurie Kynaston) reacts to his parents' divorce with a violent depression. His mother Anne (Amanda Abbington) discovers that he hasn't turned up at school for three months, and turns to her ex-husband for help.

Nicolas claims that being allowed to live with his father Pierre (John Light) and his new family will cure him, but the novelty of living with Pierre, his new wife Sofia (Amaka Okafor) and their baby son soon wears off.

Zeller has been very prolific - this is his sixth UK premiere, once again in a Christopher Hampton translation, in less than five years - and while I can't blame him for seizing his moment in the sun I'm really starting to feel the diminishing returns. Ironically The Son is a very powerful evening but I feel like director Michael Longhurst and his cast are largely managing this despite the script rather than because of it. I don't know what Zeller's own experience of depression is but I found its portrayal here problematic, particularly in the way the parents react to it. Put simply, for the story to follow the course it does, Pierre and Anne have to act with spectacular stupidity in missing all the signs that their son needs professional help fast.

Nicolas has not only been skipping school, he's been self-harming, and on multiple occasions makes it very clear to both parents that he doesn't want to live any more. Do I really need to put a SPOILER ALERT! before the fact that soon enough he's attempted suicide? I would for Anne and Pierre, as it comes as a total surprise to them. Pierre even refers to his son having been depressed, although he always speaks about it as if it's in the past, and at least that has a plausible ring of self-deception to it. But I started wondering if I was missing some kind of vital cultural difference - would upper middle-class Parisians really see mental illness as so taboo it wouldn't occur to them to send their son to a doctor? Is it considered unseemly to treat a Sexy French Depression with anything other than black coffee and Gitanes?

Ultimately I think Zeller is trying to have his cake and eat it: There are depressives who can hide their real feelings incredibly well, and then there are people whose pain is horribly clear for all to see, destructive, explosive and, of course, more obviously dramatic to stage. Nicolas is very much the latter, but everyone responds to him as if he was the former. Even when his illness becomes impossible to ignore there's still contrivances to keep the story going; I found it hard to believe the doctor (Martin Turner) would really make the parents make a difficult decision against the clock, with their son watching and being allowed to manipulate them.

But Longhurst and his team really are firing on all cylinders here, enough that at times I could overlook my significant reservations about the script to get caught up in the emotion of the melodrama. Lizzie Clachan's design throws chaos into clinically chic apartments, Abbington brings confused despair to the table, Light's unlikeable Pierre is quick to fury, and Kynaston provides the storm at the middle of it all. I found a lot to like here, but I just can't overlook the fact that the characters consistently act illogically for no reason other than the further the plot to its inevitable conclusion.

The Son by Florian Zeller is booking until the 6th of April at the Kiln Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.