In some ways, Florian Zeller is the Yasmina Reza de nos jours: a French playwright who creates one-act plays with a twist, which are then translated into English by Christopher Hampton and reach London’s West End (usually Wyndham’s Theatre, where Reza’s Art had its UK première in 1996). In other important respects, there is a profound distinction. Reza’s pieces tend to shatter the brittle veneer of bourgeois social conventions, whereas Zeller’s more prolific oeuvre is more inward-looking, dealing not just with our public persona but our core sense of identity. Plays such as The Father and The Mother portray conditions like Alzheimer’s or psychosis, and instead of entertaining us by allowing us to watch disintegration from the outside, their structural puzzles draw us in so that we are almost as much at sea as the characters.

I still don’t know what objective situation The Height Of The Storm depicts, but I don’t think Zeller does either, and that’s not in any way a criticism. Like The Father, it features an elderly man named André and his daughter Anne. Like that other father, André here (a celebrated writer) seems to suffer from Alzheimer’s, though he might also be dead. His wife Madeleine is a more likely candidate for being deceased, but Anne and other daughter Elise carry on dialogues with their parents as if nothing were out of the ordinary... except when it is: when a passing, deliberately evasive reference is made to a funeral or “the Blue House”, apparently a residential home where Anne, at least, wishes André to retire to. A couple of other characters are identified in the programme only as “The Woman” and “The Man”, with a running joke involving Lucy Cohu’s character being referred to by a series of different (but mostly similar) names.

If the situation seems mysterious and alienating, Zeller’s plain language and Jonathan Kent’s more or less straightforward production keep us connected. So, above all, do the two central performances. Jonathan Pryce as André never alludes to, still less openly accepts, his condition; he largely takes refuge in rumbling and in lengthy quotation, probably from his own works. He is at his most relaxed in the company of Madeleine, whose ambiguous status and mercurial temperament Eileen Atkins portrays seemingly effortlessly; it’s not often one can say Pryce is outshone, but I think it happens here, however unobtrusively. Amanda Drew and Anna Madeley are far from villains, but their filial love in each case has its limits, as Drew’s Anne goes through André’s papers with a view to publishing a not-quite-posthumous anthology and Madeley’s Elise invites along her estate agent boyfriend who may or may not be preparing to sell the family house once André’s packed away.

The brief coda to the 80-minute piece is its key: André and Madeleine left alone, quietly hymning their closeness to each other through their 50-year marriage. Alive or dead, the pair survive as a composite entity, defining each other as well as themselves. It’s a play that’s almost impossible to decipher, but not at all difficult to understand.

Written for the Financial Times.