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Show: The Father
Society: White Cobra Theatre Company
Venue: Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man
Credits: By Florian Zeller. Translated by Christopher Hampton
Type: Sardines
Author: Paul Johnson
Performance Date: 01/04/2024
The Father
Paul Johnson | 01 Apr 2024 23:39pm
Photo: Paul Johnson
They say that almost all of us will come into contact (either directly or caring for a loved one) with dementure at some point in our lifetimes. How similar dementure is to my own condition (PSP) isn’t known but there are similar traits.
Usually, there is a ulterio. r motive for mounting this production. Anthony Hopkins famously won an OSCAR for his portrayal as the central character of the piece. This time, the White Cobra Theatre Company gives an extraordinary performance of Florian Zeller’s brilliant piece of theatre. They have done it so well I would be very surprised if it doesn’t win the MADF Easter Full Length Play Fastival outright. The reason is quite simple: it cannot get any better than this, amateur or professional. iIt is so sensitively delivered and perfectly directed that even though there is still an entry to come, if it is as perfect, MADF will need to split the cup in half and announce a tie.
In the play we meet eighty-year-old André (Ian Spliby is excellent) has the dementure. Zeller’s writing makes us believe he has his own flat. He has a housekeeper and his daughter visits… oh, and the housekeeper is stealing from him…usually his watch. How strange that his daughter knows where his hidden cupboard is. Anyway, he doesn’t recognise anybody anymore, except for his daughter, Ann, and even then then the jury’s still out. André is going through housekeepers quicker than you can say ‘altzheimer’s society’ (he probably accuses them all of stealing) and it falls on Anne to find the replacement.
We discover Anne is planning a move to London, and it is only near the end that we discover she has already moved with her boyfriend, Pierre (Richard Jordon co-founder). André is already living in a care home and the people who we have seen come and go in ‘his flat’ are in fact people who work at the home. We have seen the play through André’s eyes, and things are really mixed up in there.
It turns out that White Cobra co-founder Kate Billingham (Anne) has come across the disease directly when her own father had Alzheimer’s and when Chris Baglin delivered his adjudication he also needed to disclose that his mother also died from this progressive disease. (He didn’t have a bad word to say about the performance, by the way).