Force Majeure

adapted by Tim Price from Ruben Östlund's film

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 6 January 2022

Michael Longhurst directs Rory Kinnear as Tomas, Lyndsey Marshall as his wife Ebba, Oliver Savell and Bo Bragason as their children Harry and Vera (in the performance I saw) and Siena Kelly and Sule Rimi as their friends Jenny and Mats in this inventive stage adaptation of the Swedish film Force Majeure released in 2014.

On a fantastically inventive stage designed by Jon Bausor Tomas and his family arrive in a ski resort for a family holiday. The children are fractious, young Harry whining and teenage Vera chilled out, while Ebba ruefully acknowledges to another guest that it is almost imposible to separate her husband from his phone and work commitments. 

Anything could trigger a crisis: an avalanche does the trick, causing Tomas to flip into panicked survivalist mode and then, afterwards, denying his reaction until a video forces him to realise that his memory of events cannot be correct. The impending collapse of his marriage, built as it is on a wearied acceptance of disappointment on the part of his wife, finally forces him to confront his insecurities. In a brilliant counterpoint to his agony, his friend Mats has a soul-searching night arguing with his partner which is a comic tour de force of psychobabble.

It's incredibly ambitious to stage a piece set in a ski resort in the confines of the Donmar stage, but with a steeply raked and white carpeted floor the place is brought to life as various cast members ski unerringly down the slope and into one of the passages used by the audience to reach their seats. In the meantime the crisis afflicting Tomas and his family is played out on the slopes and in their hotel suite. Actors of the calibre of Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshall can be depended on to articulate the emtional rollercoaster of Tomas and Ebba's 'holiday', allowing us to see everything from ridiculousness to self-indulgence to pain, but it is a tribute to the young actors playing their children that sibling brattishness can be so convincingly played and so easily be shown to mask deeper insecurities. Harry can whine with the best of them about his missing sunglasses, but he is clearly anxious when he senses the tensions rising between his parents, while Vera's adolescent stand-offishness masks (as it often does) a deep-seated dependance on the family not being ruffled.

There is a fragile optimism at the end when Harry accusingly asks his father whether he is smoking and Tomas instinctively denies it even while he has a cigarette in his hand. Then he quietly tells his son to ask the question again, and confesses that he is smoking but that he will give it up when they get home. For the first time in years he is not being an invincible man and we can hope that his faltering steps will lead him out of the prison he built himself.

Given the twin dangers of this play wandering into melodrama or mere superficiality it is a credit to all concerned that the balance of humour and agony was finely maintained to produce an enjoyable yet thought provoking entertainment