Being and nothingness

Florian Zeller has been reading Pinter. And Pinter started out in repertory thrillers where suspense was created by delaying revelations until the last minute. He tried an experiment. Suppose you delay the revelations indefinitely. The results were interesting. Pinter’s characters were vague, stark silhouettes lacking background and substance. Audiences found them inscrutably suggestive. Zeller follows suit. He presents us with a bourgeois marriage. The father works. The mother sits at home being stylishly empty-headed. Their grown-up son lives with his girlfriend. No other details are offered. It’s evening. Mother, disported on an all-white sofa, greets her husband and languidly interrogates him about his day’s activities and casts aspersions on his fidelity. He refuses to confirm or deny her accusations. The son pays a visit. Did that nasty girlfriend kick you out? asks the Mother. She pours poison in his ear about the girlfriend’s multifarious sexual indiscretions. This is all very weird and amusing. Then it becomes incredible. The Mother puts on her foxiest scarlet dress and begs her son to take her out on a hot date. Chic restaurants and dance clubs are suggested. Clearly the woman is loopy. This resolves a question posed by the surroundings. The house is obsessively white. The walls, the floor, the furniture, and the plain linen jimjams favoured by the Mother, are as bleached-out as a padded cell. The girlfriend arrives. She’s beautiful and knows it. That’s all we learn about her.

And there you have the play. Three blank gestures supporting a nutcase. Instead of living up to Pinter’s oblique strangeness Zeller declines into oddball banality. The dad is a baffled scowl, the girlfriend is a preening minx and the son is a self-regarding tumescence. The Mother, being off her head, is licensed to do or say anything because the author has disclaimed any need to provide her with rational motives.