The Son — an unflinching exploration of teenage depression and divorce

The room is elegant: white panelling, high ceilings, a grand piano beyond the folding doors. We read smart Parisian flat, sophisticated living. But odd details in Lizzie Clachan’s design tell a different story: a patch of graffiti, institutional chairs and a huge, black sack suspended over the space. What is inside it? Whatever it is, it is clear it is going to come crashing down on the nice parquet floor.

This strained domestic interior is home to The Son, the latest in French writer Florian Zeller’s family album of plays to reach the UK (translated by Christopher Hampton). Like The Father and The Mother , it’s a moving, unflinching exploration of a mental health disorder, and like its predecessors it focuses on a pinch point in family life. Here it’s the combination of divorce and adolescence. The son in question is teenage Nicolas, who has been acting up since his parents split. As the play opens, things have reached crisis point — he is about to be expelled from school. Maybe his father, distracted by a new son, new partner and new job, should intervene?

Where The Father was a shattering study of dementia, The Son depicts teenage depression. It’s not as formally daring as The Father, which used structure to suggest the disorientation of dementia, but instead dramatic irony conveys the helplessness of an overwhelmed teenager shuttled between caring but misguided parents. His mother, Anne, wrings her hands; his father, Pierre, lays down the law. “I want this to be a new start,” he instructs Nicolas, as he signs him up to a new school. By the midpoint of Michael Longhurst’s taut, tense production you can practically hear the audience willing them to seek help.

While there were echoes of Lear in The Father, here you see traces of Hamlet, of Ibsen and of Chekhov’s The Seagull. And the play’s title acquires irony as we learn more about Pierre’s relationship with his own father. There are jarring points in the plotting, however. What school allows a student to be absent for three months before contacting the parents? Would Nicolas’s move into self-harm not prompt his father to seek medical advice?

But the play holds you with its compassion and its sense of gathering dread. And it is beautifully acted here. John Light’s brittle Pierre and Amanda Abbington’s anxiously clenched Anne begin the play yards apart on the stage, as if preparing for a duel, and end up clinging to one another like shipwreck victims. Laurie Kynaston is mercurial and moving as Nicolas, by turns truculent, charming, angry and childlike. Sitting bunched up on his father’s chaise longue, he suddenly looks tiny and lost, and you see his terror at being unable to articulate what is happening to him. It’s a plea for better listening, and agony to watch.

★★★★☆

To April 6, kilntheatre.com

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