The Father review: Owen Roe gives a masterful performance in Zeller’s play

The Father  ★★★★
The Gate Theatre, Dublin

As Florian Zeller’s play begins, in a crisp translation from Christopher Hampton, we find an aging father growing more and more confused – a condition that Owen Roe’s gruff Andre covers by behaving with absolute conviction.

Why has he lashed out at his nurse, his daughter wants to know? Because she has stolen his watch, he insists. Where did he leave the watch? He can’t remember, but now it’s gone. “There’s your proof!” But little is stable when your mind misplaces the sequence of events, faces and places, even whole personal histories – and the unsettling genius of the play is that as Andre’s confusion grows, so does ours.

Zeller’s conceit, fluently understood and enhanced by director Ethan McSweeny, is to use the mechanics of theatre to present the play from Andre’s moithered perspective. Here, scenes don’t flow, they fracture, distend or repeat. Andre’s daughter, Anne (Fiona Bell), etched with worry and fatigue will reappear to him and us as a complete stranger (Charlotte McCurry). The chronology and setting is uncertain and Francis O’Connor’s excellent set – a bright and claustrophobic emulation of chic minimalism – offers few clues, apart from a neat chandelier of twisting metal that delicately evokes retreating neural pathways.

One of the pleasures of theatre is our swift ability to work things out: identities, relationships, settings. In The Father, the mist takes longer to lift. Zeller’s approach is deeply empathetic, but it’s hardly sentimental. If dementia follows a theatrical form, he suggests, it’s tragicomedy.

Charlie Chaplin found nothing funnier than a man trying to maintain dignity while entirely at sea. In Roe’s beautifully pitched performance, he finds heartbreaking comedy in a man desperately improvising to cover the cracks. “Ahhh, yes,” Andre agrees, when it is clear 10 years have slipped clean from his mind, later leaning against a bookcase with forced nonchalance when meeting his son-in-law, Simon O’Gorman’s frustrated Pierre, apparently for the first time. This makes Andre’s mounting distress almost unbearable, constantly threatened or patronised, slipping inexorably towards what Shakespeare called “second childishness and mere oblivion”.

It is hard to decide what to make of the play’s bid for universality, though. Andre comes with little context: he’s affluent, owns a large apartment in Paris and bears a family tragedy lightly inscribed. But we hear little of a career, a wife, or the details of a lifetime. Perhaps these too have been cruelly eroded. But that totemic title suggests a broader crisis in patriarchy; that these are the fears and laments of old certainties dissolving. “He had so much authority,” says a disbelieving Anne, who, like all characters here, plays a satellite to The Father.

Nobody could regard Roe’s masterful performance as just a metaphor, though. Or miss the tragic echoes of his King Lear. That character asked a similarly trembling question to the one that ends this play, not raging on the heath, but in a nursing home: Who exactly am I?

- Until Oct 22nd, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival