In our time, more and more people are faced with the sad experience of losing the mental integrity of their loved ones. A test of life, dramatized with mastery and great response by the French playwright Florian Zeller in 2012, with the title “The Father” (La Pere), which was transferred to the big screen in 2020, giving Anthony Hopkins an Oscar for his first male role .
Awarded in 2014 with the “Moliere” award, the highest theatrical honor for France, the play deals with an emotional way but also with dark humor the adventure of human relationships within a family, as the eighty-year-old André, Anna’s father, begins to lose his mind control. Although he tries to delineate his identity, he has hallucinatory impressions of his surroundings. He questions his loved ones, reality itself and develops complete negativity towards receiving medical support. He wonders why Elise, his most beloved daughter, has not come to see him for a long time.
Anne, who lives with him, is torn between her love and her duty as a daughter to take care of her father and trying to maintain balance in her personal life, being married to Antoine. Understandably the limits of her endurance are tested in her struggle to manage an extremely difficult and sensitive psychological situation.
An emotionally charged drama unfolds before the viewer’s eyes, to which he is not a stranger nor can he remain a stranger, as Zeller, through the blurred vision of a man with Alzheimer’s but also through the objective view of reality, illustrates with tenderness and tragicomics snapshots life with dementia and highlights the physical and mental losses that usually accompany old age.
The audience is involved in what is happening on stage, having a double view of things and relationships, which are changed and redefined under the burden of mental illness. He thus becomes a participant in questions that arise for his own existence, for the existence of those around him and for the dynamics of human relationships that are forced to revise under the state of the changing conditions of life.
Distant echoes and reflections reach from “King Lear” to Zeller’s psychographic drama, to remind us of the parallels between the madness of the Shakespearean old king and the dementia of his own central character and to highlight correspondences of the father’s relationship with his daughters, which are tested to the limit in endurance and tolerance, as in Shakespearean tragedy.
This shocking play, with its dark humor and intense look at the adventure of the human condition, is presented on the stage of the “Contemporary Theater” with the directorial approach of the excellent Eleni Skotis, translated by Giorgos Hatzinikolaos, who also supervised the design of the stage area . The demanding role of the Father is shouldered by the charismatic actor Periklis Moustakis, with a worthy co-star Ioanna Pappa in the role of the daughter.
Four notable actors (Alexandros Koch and Lili Tsesmatzoglou, Konstantinos Seiradakis and Kalliopi Panagiotidou) share the stage with them. The costume image of the faces is signed by Maria Anamaterou, the music by Patrinos Stavros Gasparatos and the lighting by the experienced Antonis Panagiotopoulos.
A remarkable production by the “Nama” team.
#Theatre #Life #Dementia
