Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩

There are two types of people who will be be most interested in Florian Zeller’s latest play. The first is men who have had an affair and the second is men who haven’t.Women are marginalised.
The author is French hit machine Florian Zeller whose The Father conveyed the experience of suffering from dementia in such an inventive way it would be a crime to mention how here and risk spoiling it for those who have not yet seen the recent movie version starring an Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins.
It is enough to say that, much like that work, Zeller’s latest is also a puzzle play.Except where The Father is eventually revelatory, The Forest (also translated by Christopher Hampton) remains a mystery, the strangest part of which is why any theatre would want to resurrect the dramatically redundant theme of the male mid-life crisis.
It helps that Jonathan Kent’s stylish production is cast with two charismatic leads.Toby Stephens and Paul McGann play versions of the same man, Pierre, a successful surgeon who comes home to his wife (Gina McKee) to find his adult daughter in bits after discovering that the man she has been trying to have a baby with has been sleeping with someone else.
The action moves to the next section in Anna Fleischle’s elegant, lego-like design, a Paris garret where a second married man much like the first is getting dressed to leave, much to the resentment of his lover (Angel Coulby).
Versions of these scenes repeat along with other encounters throughout the show’s uninterrupted 90 minutes.Some see the man’s jilted lover lying dead and blooded on the love-pad’s bed, like a premonition of where all the treachery will end.
Realism is supplanted by surrealism.Finbar Lynch (fresh from playing the stage manager in Paula Vogel’s Indecent) is a white faced policeman who interrogates each Pierre like a conscience, or an underworld detective.
If these men are simply drawn, the women are gossamer. Exactly what has attracted an actress of McKee’s standing to the unnamed role of The Wife is anyone’s guess, other than perhaps loyalty after playing the title role in Zeller’s The Mother.
Granted, there is an intriguing quality to the unsettling evening as a split psyche emerges of a man who daily deceives those closest to him. But the symbolism is heavy handed.
Imagine a mash-up combining Pinter’s Betrayal and the thriller Fatal Attraction, but less satisfying than either.