RISING young French playwright Florian Zeller is bound to garner yet more success with this intriguing study of the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, seen through the lens of eponymous father Andre — played beautifully by Kenneth Cranham (right) — who’s struggling with the onset of the degenerative brain disease.

Zeller uses the phenomenon of theatre itself to replicate the fragmentary world as the Alzheimer’s sufferer might experience it. There are short scenes, punctuated by sudden blackouts, and non-chronological sequences, sometimes recapitulating earlier scenes with slight differences, sometimes shifting forward and progressing the plot.

This temporal game-playing loosens the audience’s grip on time and the overall narrative, bringing them closer to the experience of the disease.

Shock tactics, eliciting the anxious feelings the disease might wreak, are deployed too. The actors playing Andre’s daughter Anne — the vibrant and warm Claire Skinner — is replaced in one scene by another, Rebecca Charles, replicating that terrifying moment of non-recognition that Alzheimer’s is so associated with.

Two other actors – the intricate and dextrous Colin Tierney and Jim Sturgeon — appear to be Pierre, Anne’s partner — and the latter appears later as a carer too.

Zeller also hints at that darker area — the abuse of vulnerable people — in a painful scene when Andre is slapped and psychologically terrorised.

Like Andre, we grapple to piece together fragmenting experience but an uncanny sense that all is not well dominates.

Sudden changes in lighting and sound add to the sense of panic and the accompanying Bach Prelude distorts perception.

All the performances are strong, with Cranham playing Andre like a domestic version of Lear or a less carefree incarnation of Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

He rails against his ineluctable decline, speaking the ringing, staccato prose translated by Christopher Hampton, like the great Pinter/Beckett actor that he is. And he memorably recreates that familiar, careworn expression those struck down by the disease often wear.

This play stands firmly in the tradition of absurdism in its use of language, the non sequiturs, the violence underpinning the smooth surfaces and the comic resonances of impending tragic loss.

Like Dickens’s The Haunted Man, The Father is a meditation on how memory is central to identity and the catastrophe of its loss. Thought-provoking stuff, indeed.

Runs until June 13, box office: www.tricycle.co.uk

Review by Gillian Piggott