It’s a beautiful play, slightly reduced in this production, but absolutely worth seeing.
The Height of the Storm is set in an older couple’s home outside Paris. André, a renowned writer, has dementia. Although she appears, his wife Madeleine, the equally bright and vastly more practical member of the team, may be dead. Or André may be dead. Reality, as slippery as ever, keeps shifting. In my experience, the richness in this play is in the not knowing.
I was lucky enough to wander into a matinee performance of the premiere English-language run at Wyndham’s Theatre in London in 2018. Exquisite performances by Jonathan Price and Eileen Atkins. I was so engaged in the struggle to make meaning — Who’s dead? What is real? — I had the sense that I could feel my brain working like a muscle. The sensation was exquisite. Then I noticed my hands floating towards the ceiling. What’s this? A spontaneous gesture of praise. Delight in the fundamental task of making meaning. Hallelujah.
Inevitably, that experience, the most transcendent I’ve had in the theatre, informs how I received this strong semi-professional production from United Players — including my sense that director Adam Henderson’s attempt to solve the puzzle and then direct us to his solution is a mistake.
Henderson has decided that he knows who’s dead and, as a result, he makes dementia a dominant determinant in his interpretation. His “solution” is perfectly supportable; I just think it’s more rewarding to leave more questions open.
Proceeding from his foundational choice, Henderson adds actions and text that aren’t in the script. Off the top, André enters and puts a record on a turntable. We hear garbled fragments from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Time present and time future …” Without this, we would have understood that time shifts in the play. And, in my opinion, inviting the audience to understand the text primarily in terms of André’s dementia is unnecessarily limiting.
This explanatory impulse informs Ben Paul’s lighting. Whoops! Altered illumination, we must be in a different reality!
And this insistence on laying all cards on the table extends to the performances: too often, there’s clarity where ambiguity would be more challenging. A figure arrives partway through this 80-minute, intermissionless piece. They refer to an affair that might shed light on André and Madeleine’s marriage. This passage can be played obliquely, insinuatingly, but Henderson’s choice is to move the actor and the character as close as he can to outright accusation. I’m not faulting the performer, who’s very good, but, in my opinion, Henderson is doing too much work for the audience and restricting our rewards.
In this United Players production, clear, forcefully pursued objectives abound.
I’m probably making it sound like I didn’t enjoy or appreciate this mounting, but that’s not the case. Although I think the overall tone is too illustrative, thanks to the direction and performances, the underlying emotional content is honest and deeply felt. And the viewing experience of this interpretation is still unsettling, as it should be.
Interestingly, Deborah Vieyra, who’s playing Anne, the couple’s older daughter, occupies both ends of the spectrum. Her portrait of Anne is relatively large, but touchingly sincere; we can see how hard Anne is trying to express her love for her parents and how difficult they make that for her. Christine McBeath (Madeleine) is limited by Henderson’s tendency to have his actors show us their subtext, but there’s an underlying complexity and rootedness in her work. Jerry Wasserman’s André is so thoroughly realized that, when he embraced his two daughters, Anne and Élise, I gasped with emotion.
In my experience, The Height of the Storm is best served by a naturalistic set. The juxtaposition with slippery reality works and that’s how we live our lives after all. For budget reasons, Henderson told me, he went with an abstract set, which has been ably supplied by Emily Dotson. Still, conceptually, I have a hunch that a black box with a single entrance and the necessary furniture would have served him better.
There’s a really good show here. It’s one of the smartest and most formally adventuresome you’re going to see this season. It would have been ever better, I think, if Henderson hadn’t been so eager to show us his work, if you know what I mean.
THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM By Florian Zeller. Translated from the French by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Adam Henderson. A United Players production at the Jericho Arts Centre until February 9. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: Christine McBeath and Jerry Wasserman (Photo by Nancy Caldwell)
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