The Truth at Apollo Theatre

I have seen several Florian Zeller plays and films over the years (I even wrote about some of them) and that experience made me want to see The Truth. The names Mangan and O'Hanlon helped too.

Knowing that the dialogue would be the key feature I went for a cheap seat rather than a good one and paid a very modest £35 for Section Grand Circle

Row A Seat 2. I could not quite see all of the stage due to a rail but it was more than good enough and well worth the money.

The Truth is all about when to tell the truth and when to lie, either to protect yourself or to protect the person you are lying to.

The play starts with a simple truth, Stephen Mangan's character is having am affair and we know this because they are in bed together. After that things get more and more complicated as the lies and the truth mix unexpectedly. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that one of the complications is trying to work out who knows about the affair, if indeed they do know, and how they found out.

The dialogue is full of dramatic and unexpected twists delivered brilliantly by the whole cast who twist things further with subtle expressions that we can see but not the person they are talking to.

It is all rather brilliant and extremely funny. The audience laughed, gasped in surprise and clapped all the way through.

The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre

Hampstead Theatre is one of those places that I like to think of as somewhere that I go to regularly only to find out that I have not been there for three years (The Forest by Florian Zeller in February 22) so it was good to have an excuse to go back. The excuse came courtesy of a play by Tom Stoppard starring Simon Russell Beale.

Hampstead Theatre is quite small and from my experience of the place I knew that seats at the back are still good and so I went for Dress Circle Row C Seat 20 at £36. Frustratingly they have changed the seat numbering, there use to be just one sequence of rows A to (at least) N, so it is hard to compare with previous visits, which is the whole point of me noting seat numbers and prices.

All I knew about the play was that the subject was A E Housman, and I had forgotten that by the time that the performance day arrived.

And all I knew about A E Housman was that he wrote the poem A Shropshire Lad  which did not help as the play was about his life as a Latin scholar, which I did not know anything about.

The play started with Housman's death and took a look back at his time as a young man at Oxford University. 

There were lots of discussions about the Classics including the accuracy of the various sources and subsequent translations. I am not a Classicist but I actually found these discussions quite interesting, perhaps encouraged by recently seeing The Browning Version which played in the same area.

The students were less interesting, other then as a view on life at that time, thought there was a marked change when Wilde made a late appearance and risked stealing the show..

The Invention of Love came across as theatre for theatre purists, the construction of the play was intelligent, the staging was interesting and effective, and the cast was strong. I am not sure that it needed a big name to play the old A E Housman but I am am not going to object to seeing Simon Russell Beale on stage again.

In many ways The Invention of Love was really not my thing but the quality of the show won me over and I enjoyed it immensely.

The Father at Curzon Richmond was superb

I like watching films but am not much of a cinema fan (for reasons that probably make no sense) and am usually happy to wait for them to hit the small screen so it takes something special to drag me out. The Father was certainly special enough to do that.

My primary interest was in the story and the story teller. I had seen the play at Richmond Theatre in 2016 and that had led me to see other Florian Zeller plays subsequently. If any further temptation was needed then the promise of an Oscar winning performance from Anthony Hopkins was more than enough.

It was towards the end of the run at Curzon Richmond before I got organised enough to book and so I found myself going at 8:30pm on a Friday evening.

A pleasant upside of that timing was the opportunity to make a first return visit to Wagamama for a year where a vegan Tofu Firecracker was exceptional. I also had time for a pint in The Olde Ship which was useful after the Firecracker.

This was only my second visit to Curzon Richmond and I had forgotten that I could get a real coffee  to take in, which was a much better option than another beer.

The Father did what I knew it would from having seen the play but it did it in a different way taking advantage of the things that films can do, like change locations quickly.

The simple, poignant, heart-wrenching story was the neurological decline of The Father. It was told from his perspective, though not in the first person, and that meant that characters changed their appearances, changed where they were living and changed what they had said. There were multiple actors playing the same role and also different roles, e.g. two played the daughter and one of those also played a nurse. We were always a little confused as to what was really going on and that gave us just a clue as to how The Father saw things.

Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as The Father as I knew he would be because he had played a similar role with great aplomb in Red 2. He is also a bloody good actor in everything else that I have seen him in.

The rest of the production, including the fabulously furnished flats and the gentle cinematography enriched the experience without ever detracting from the centrepiece of the drama, The Father.

Given the subject matter, neurodisability, it was never going to be an easy film to watch, and nor would it be to everyone's taste, but it held my full attention for an hour and a half and was very rewarding if not, in the usual sense of the word, entertaining. 

The Son at Kiln Theatre was gripping

I discovered the works of Florian Zeller more or less by accident. His play, The Father, was on at Richmond Theatre and as a regular visitor there I took a chance on it. That compelled me to see The Mother when it came to Richmond Theatre prior to a west-end run. I was mightily impressed by both plays so going to see The Son was an easy choice to make.

The venue this time was Kiln Theatre in Kilburn which used to be Tricycle Theatre and had recently reopened under its new name following an extensive refurbishment. This included a new cafe area facing the main road where I had a coffee and something to eat. There is also a good-sized bar and restaurant area but all the tables there had been booked and I was not in the mood for a full meal any way.

The oddly shaped theatre, with rows of seats on either side not facing the stage, was much as it was though all the seats had been replaced. I recalled that the raking in the stalls was quite shallow and so I went for the circle instead where my centre seat, A7, cost me a perfectly reasonable £32.5.

The Son in question was a late teenage boy living with his mother after his father left them to start a new family with another woman.

The story started with the mother telling the father that their son had become moody and was skipping school. The mother could no longer cope and thought that the father was better placed to look after him, especially after some of the things that the son had said about the father.

What followed was almost two hours of extreme teenage tribulations and the various attempts to solve them by all three parents.

As with The Father and The Mother, the heart of the play was the in-depth examination of the intra-family relationships and some of the key events that had shaped them. It was gripping stuff from beginning to end and the 105 minutes flew past.

This was one occasion where the stage direction had a clear and dramatic impact. This was particularly true when the mother and father were talking to each other taking confrontational stances some distance from each other. The father was demonstrative throughout trying to exert the power of his position when that was of no use to the situation. He was as lost as his son.

Throughout the play there was a lot of talking but not much listening and that made the son's problem difficult to solve.

There was a happy ending, of sorts, but only after a lot of pain and some bad things that could not be undone.

I loved The Son as much as I loved The Father and The Mother, and for all the same reasons. It was an excellent play superbly presented and well acted.