Ruth Leon recommends…The Forest – Hampstead Theatre

POCKET REVIEW: The Forest – Hampstead Theatre

 A world premiere of a play by Florian Zeller, one of the world’s most popular living playwrights, is an event.  The darling of international critics for his The Son, The Mother, the Oscar-winning The Father, and other hits, Zeller, it seems, has cornered the market in plays in which families reveal their faultlines.

Guilt, lies, and the fear of being found out are what underlie the thoughts and actions of the apparently successful lives of Zeller’s characters. At least, his male characters. In The Forest the women – the wife and the mistress – are underutilised and underwritten, even though the flawless Gina McKee gives the wife every scrap of reality and empathy she can find in the script.

At the centre of the play is a surgeon, played by both Toby Stephens and Paul McGann, who is having an affair with a woman who is attempting to persuade him to commit exclusively to her. So far, so prosaic. So far, so French. But for some reason, not clear to me, the man is unhinged by guilt and fear that his wife will find out. Not so French.

The play asks the audience to sort out what is actually going on. Zeller fragments the action into repeated scenes in which something changes each time.  There are symbols throughout for us to decode. Each time we return to the middle-class living room of the surgeon and his wife, the painting on the wall has changed, becoming a portrait of the mistress. Unexplained flower arrangements appear and finally fill the room. Mysterious anonymous phone calls. There is a murder and a Macbeth-like bloody apparition, an inquisitor-figure (creepily played by Finbar Lynch) with a white face and no apparent purpose, and a life-size dead stag. All of these, we understand, appear in the split, guilt-ridden mind of the split protagonist.

Zeller’s language is straight-forward, educated but not obscure. What is odd is that, in the hands of his longtime translator, Christopher Hampton, The Forest sounds stilted, that is, it sounds like a translation. This can only be deliberate. Christopher Hampton, who has performed the same function for all Zeller’s plays, which are written in French, is too good a playwright himself, and too good a linguist, not to be able to turn Zeller’s dialogue into normal, everyday English if he had wanted to do so. Clearly he and Zeller had a different aim in mind. Another mystery for the audience to solve.

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