The Father, Trafalgar Studios, SW1
reviewed for The Times, 19 March 2015
Alex Ferns in The Father (Elliot Franks)
If ever you’re feeling optimistic about marriage, you can rely on a Strindberg play to get you down. Notoriously his 1900 The Dance of Death, in which a withered couple tear at each other and toy with their guest, pre-empted Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by 60 years.
Before that, however, there was The Father, now triumphantly revived at Trafalgar Studios. It’s the tale of a crumbling marriage and a father desperately fighting for control of his child. Abbey Wright’s crisp, clear production could hardly feel more contemporary. Just don’t take a date.
In a lacklustre provincial outpost — this is Nordic drama, after all — a middle-aged captain bemoans his unadventurous career and quarrels with his wife, Laura, over the education of his beloved daughter, Bertha. When the manipulative Laura suggests Bertha might not be his child, she triggers a nervous breakdown. Hardly surprising, then, that The Father has been shunned by modern audiences as misogynistic. Laura, like Hedda Gabler, coldly destroys a man to earn her freedom — and isn’t half as charismatic.
Yet Wright’s production is too subtle to earn such easy dismissal, thanks largely to Alex Ferns’ ferocious performance as the Captain. Ferns is an emotional monstrosity, transparently consistent to himself, impossible to everyone else and brimming over with physical threat. No wonder Laura is desperate to escape. Yet he is also sharply articulate, howling the agony of a man who doesn’t know what fatherhood is in an age of incipient female self-sufficiency. If he’s a mouthpiece for misogyny, he nonetheless demands an answer.
In what should be a fraught two-hander, Ferns isn’t matched by Emily Dobbs as Laura. Dobbs is a shrewd producer and deserves much credit for bringing The Father back to the West End. Yet she’s miscast herself here: with an oddly forced sensuality, she’s too youthful for Laura. There’s no sense of the puritan faith driving her to keep Bertha from her atheist father or that she might once have been the maternal anchor he craved.
Instead the veteran June Watson, as the Captain’s old nurse, becomes the production’s darkly smothering mother figure. She leads a superb supporting cast, including a vivacious Thomas Coombes as the next generation of absent fathers. Laurie Slade’s hyper-modern adaptation is a gift to all of them and the strongest possible case for The Father’s return to the repertoire.
