The Son

by Florian Zeller

seen at the Kiln Theatre on 13 March 2019

Michael Longhurst directs Laurie Kynaston as the teenage Nicolas, Amanda Abbingdon as his mother Anne, John Light as his father Pierre, Amaka Okafor as his stepmother Sofia, Martin Turner as a doctor and Oseloka Obi as a nurse in Christpoher Hampton's transaltion of Florian Zeller's nw play, seen as part of a triptych with The Father (reviewed in October 2015) and The Mother (not seen).

The Kiln has a totally exposed stage the width of its auditorium, so upon entering the audience sees immediately a plain space with panelled white walls (somehow looking French; designed by Lizzie Clachan), a black upholstered sofa in the middle, a small writing desk and chair to one side, and a large suspended grey bag on the other side. Eventually Nicolas appears and begins to write obsessively one the wall panel immediately above the writing desk; or else he paces round the room.

When the play starts, his estranged father and mother are discussing him, as Anne (with whom he lives) has discovered that he has been skipping school, and he has expressed a desire to live with his father, Sofia and his new baby half-brother. Pierre agrees to this arrangement. 

The back wall panels open to reveal a spacious room with a grand piano and some other furniture; we are evidently now in Pierre and Sofia's apartment, and Nicolas, uneasy, unwilling or unable to explain himself, is trying to settle in. Soon, in a violent expression of anger, he trashes the apartment, overturning bookshelves and hurling papers about, and emptying the suspended bag which contains his clothes and possessions. Curiously, no-one remarks on this disarray, and everyone simply walks over or around tumbled furniture as if it were no kind of hazard at all.

The audience can (no doubt) recognise the pain and confusion of the adolescent, traumatised by the break-up of his parents' marriage and cast into existential despair. His parents don't seem to consider that their break-up is a problem, and they are baffled by his pain, his silences, his self-harming; and yet they are not unfeeling or cruel people. Sofia, in the unenviable situation of dealing with a difficult stepson, tries to maintain patience, but baulks at the idea that Nicolas might babysit when their arranged babysitter pulls out at the last minute on the first occasion on which they might go out after the baby's birth.

Laurie Kynaston portrays the increasing misery and desperation of his character with great skill and sensitivity, so that Nicolas never becomes tiresome even though he is tremendously self-absorbed. On the few occasions when he is relaxed one sees the vestiges of the charming boy he might have been, and there is a lovely scene when he laughs at and then emulates his father in an hilarious 'hip dance'. John Light as Pierre shows us a man used to (but not corrupted by) success and a certain level of control of his circumstances, finding himself out of his depth and scarily aware of falling into the role of over-critical father which he so much resented when he was young.

As is typical of Zeller's writing, much is deliberately left unsaid and the sense of a wider world is almost completely absent - even social media are absent, which may stretch credulity when dealing with adolescence. Reviewers have evidently felt uncomfortable with this, though again (as with The Height of the Storm, reviewed in October 2018) I think it is entirely reasonable for the audience to draw its own conclusions without being spoonfed too many explicit explanations.

Although the main emotional focus is on Nicolas's situation, Pierre's experience as a son is also obviously important, and by the same token the two women in the play are rather underwritten, with Anne mostly absent and Sofia feeling increasingly sidelined by Pierre's preoccupation with his older son. The final crisis is heartrending, even if all too predictable, and while the means of showing Pierre's sense of failure may be dramatically too tricksy (Zeller always likes to destabilise the ordinary flow of time in his plays) John Light rises to the occasion with an agonised emotional breakdown.

All in all, a powerful production with two excellent male leads; though Barber's Adagio for Strings should have been avoided in what is otherwise a well designed piece..