The Forest
Hampstead Theatre, London,
until March 12
The French playwright Florian Zeller has what has turned out to be a lucrative obsession with family life. After his plays The Mother and The Father – the latter turned into an Oscar-winning film with Anthony Hopkins – comes, with a grim inevitability, his take on infidelity. He chooses to call it The Forest, presumably because it’s one of those things couples often find it very difficult to find a way through.
It boasts a superb star performance from Toby Stephens as a middle-aged surgeon who embarks on a passionate love affair with a much younger woman. He’s especially good at playing men under intense pressure – I think, for instance, of him in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg – and this time around it’s fascinating the way the strain is there all the time beneath the urbane and polished exterior.
Zeller complicates matters a bit by having Paul McGann apparently playing the alter ego of the adulterous husband, and it takes a while to feel comfortable with this plot device. McGann, I should say, acquits himself well in challenging circumstances. As the long-suffering and necessarily boring wife, Gina McKee offers a study in dignified despair, and, as the temptress who disrupts all their lives, Angel Coulby radiates danger.
Translated by Christopher Hampton, Zeller’s long-term collaborator, and mounted on Anna Fleischle’s triplex set, The Forest is absorbing drama and the cast give it some welly. I wonder, however, if it’s really quite as clever as it seems to think it is, and I wonder, too, where Zeller goes from here. I suppose sooner or later he will have to write a play about death and bereavement.
