The Tricycle

Those who saw Florian Zeller's Alzheimer's play The Father will be savvy to the dizzying cleverness with which this French writer constructs his plays.

It is a form that continuously pushes his audience off balance. Any assumption that a scene can be taken at face value is undermined by the subtlest of signals that the whole thing actually exists in a character's mind.

With The Father, the thrilling play that propelled Zeller onto the British theatre scene last year and which returns to the West End next month, the technique gave audiences not just a portrayal of dementia, but a taste of it. With his earlier play, The Mother, starring Gina McKee in the title role, it does the same, but for the condition of loneliness.

McKee's possessive Anne is 25 years into a marriage with Peter (Richard Clothier) who she suspects is having an affair. She feels equally neglected by her grown-up son Nicholas (William Postlethwaite) who never returns her incessant calls.

Yet while in Laurence Boswell's beautifully paced production, McKee powerfully captures the sense of abandonment felt by a woman when her children have flown the nest and their father may follow suit, there is a fatal sense here of some self-indulgence.

Whereas you wanted to give The Father a hug, you want to give The Mother a shake. Her story is more sad than tragic.

Still, there is the sheer thrill of seeing a story reveal itself with fiendishly clever sophistication, and on that level this Zeller, which like The Father is also translated with pitch perfect judgement by Christopher Hampton, is certainly worth seeing.