Gina McKee is terrific at “fiddly”
acting: those tiny movements that are quite inconsequential, but go to
build up a detailed picture of natural behaviour. She polishes the
screen of her phone, or picks at a toe through her thick sock, or
gathers up a batch of magazines which she has allowed to slide off a
breakfast tray. (I don’t even know whether this move was planned or an
entirely organic cover.) It all goes to make her character, 47-year-old
Anne, more believable in her depression following her grown-up
children’s departure from home. Paradoxically, she is believable even
when we see the same scenes replayed in radically differing versions
and have no idea
what to
believe.
Florian Zeller’s play is, broadly speaking, a companion piece to
The Father, about to return to the
West End. (Indeed,
The Mother
opened a few hours after Kenneth Cranham won the Critics’ Circle Award
for best actor for
The Father.)
In each, shifts of reality and perspective interrogate the
protagonist’s state of mind. In
The
Father, the cause is Alzheimer’s, in
The Mother Anne’s Freudian jealousy
regarding her son and the girlfriend whom she perceives as robbing her
of him, and also a pathological (and as far as we can tell, justified)
mistrust of her husband’s fidelity.
I choose to interpret the repetition of scenes as presenting matters to
us from the point of view of different participants. Thus, Anne in her
own view is quiet and reasonable, except when she is forensically
interrogating husband Peter (Richard Clothier), whilst in the
perception of girlfriend Elodie she speaks in a low, menacing rumble,
the classic wicked stepmother only without the "step-". It is possible
to find some misogyny in the play, but only by ignoring the
counterbalancing misandry: no one here gets off lightly.
Like
The Father, this play is
translated from the French with sensitivity and cleverness by
Christopher Hampton; also like that other play, it comes into London
from the Ustinov studio in Bath already garlanded with acclaim. (The
difference is that this production is helmed by the Ustinov’s artistic
director Laurence Boswell.) Zeller’s
The
Truth opens off-West End in March; the snowballing sense that he
constitutes a significant theatrical discovery is palpable.
Written for the Financial
Times.