Moving and meaningful play takes on taboos around brain disease

The Sinodun Players present The Father

Wallingford Corn Exchange

Tuesday, October 14

THE poet Mary Lathrap wrote in 1895, “Just walk a mile in his moccasins before you abuse, criticise and accuse”. Florian Zeller’s The Father takes that sentiment to heart, immersing the audience into the fractured existence caused by dementia.

First performed in its original French in 2012, Zeller’s play won the Molière Prize for best play in 2014, and he went on to direct the English-language film version featuring Anthony Hopkins in the title role in 2020.

The Sinodun Players have embraced the work’s deliberately unsettling drama with professionalism and sensitivity. With clever staging, strong performances and emotional depth, the play, at the group’s home theatre in the Corn Exchange, Wallingford, captures the confusion, loss and heartbreak that come with the illness, both for those who suffer from dementia and the families around them.

The elderly title character, André (Chris Bertrand), gradually loses his grip on reality, while his daughter, Anne (Rebecca Cleverley), struggles to care for him as his world becomes increasingly muddled and uncertain.

She is supported by her husband Pierre (Keith Heddle) and care worker Laura (Kaity Eames). Techniques such as rearranging furniture, overlapping episodic scenes and employing alternative actors (Alex Reid and Graham Watt) to play Anne and Pierre at different moments successfully portray the doubt and frustration that dementia involves. Like its sufferers, the audience too begin to question what is real and what is imagined. The strong acting from the cast grew throughout the play, pulling the audience into the circumstances, although knowing looks from the cast to the audience in earlier scenes were perhaps misjudged. Bertrand’s performance was powerful, blending vulnerability and bursts of misplaced confidence as André tries to cling to fragments of his old self. Cleverley brought warmth and exhaustion to Anne, particularly in her “nightmare” scene, a haunting moment that captures the wider toll of dementia.

Ollie Weikert’s original music adds to the atmosphere through his use of themes and arrhythmic changes. The impressive set design by Greg Ryder cleverly uses gauze and lighting to great effect, providing for near-instantaneous split staging with minimal intervention for scene changes from stage manager Val Kent and her crew.

The play certainly helps to achieve director Gloria Wright’s goal of breaking the taboo around dementia. The question and answer panel sessions that followed each performance were thoughtful and educational additions.

Dementia specialist Claudia offered insight into symptoms, coping mechanisms and the importance of support networks. Hearing real experiences from members of the audience deepened the impact of the play, transforming it from a performance into a shared reflection on empathy and understanding.

The Father succeeds in being both moving and meaningful, and it doesn’t shy away from the painful realities of dementia. The Sinodun Players are to be commended for putting on a brave and profoundly human story about a condition that is increasingly affecting so many in our society.

Lizzie Pannett and
Esme Hurley