The Mother

Tricycle Theatre

London NW6

The mother in French writer Florian Zeller's play is 47-years-old Anne.

Married for 25 years, her children have now grown up and departed and she has lost focus, direction and meaning in her life.

Her days are spent in aimless anticipation of unrealised communication with her absent and neglectful son Nicholas, while her constant disappointment is mediated by a diet of alcohol, pills and an occasional foray to the dress shop. Husband Peter, solicitous if somewhat distant, has a corporate career and an external life which can at best be described as adjacent to Anne’s.

The play is intricately structured with the same scenes repeated but from slightly different perspectives, such that the audience is unsure whether Anne is subject to delusion or if more insidious events are afoot.

Is Peter really going to a four-day seminar in Leicester or is he off for a spicy weekend at the seaside with his son’s girlfriend Elodie? Did Nicholas really arrive at dead of night? Has he left Elodie and is he home to stay?

Director Laurence Boswell's production is staged within a sterile white box-like space that provides a neutral backdrop for the tortuous uncertainties and meanderings of Anne’s mind and it's a dramatic visual contrast to the bright red dress she wears for much of the play.

If The Mother has a weakness, it is that the characters fail to elicit sympathy. One can empathise with Anne’s despair and desolation as she struggles with “empty nest” syndrome but it does not register high on the Richter scale of emotional response.

There is no sense of how or why an intelligent, attractive and vivacious woman in such comfortable circumstances finds herself in such a psychological black hole.

In Anne, there are tragic similarities to Tennessee Williams's Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire but, unlike Du Bois, there is no hint of hinterland or trajectory here.

Even so, there's an accomplished performance by Gina McKee as the obsessive and paranoid Anne and she gives a sumptuous and riveting portrayal of a woman on the brink of mental disintegration. On stage for all of the play's 85 minutes, this is virtually a one-woman play and a disturbingly engaging one at that.

Richard Coulthier as Peter, William Postlethwaite as Nicholas and Frances McNamee as Elodie give worthy support but the acting plaudits all belong to McKee.

Zeller, whose The Father was highly acclaimed at this theatre last year, deserves praise again for providing such a challenging and meaty female role. So too does Christopher Hampton for the elegant translation of a play which won one of France's top awards, the Prix Moliere, in 2008.

Runs until March 12, box office: tricycle.co.uk

Review by Dennis Poole