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The Father review - Alfred Molina is tremendous in Florian Zeller’s tragic farce

The Father review - Alfred Molina is tremendous in Florian Zeller’s tragic farce. Pasadena Playhouse, Los AngelesThe actor brings out the dark humour in Zeller’s modern classic about a man with dementia, fluctuating from absurdity to despair in a heartbeat

It is more than five years since Florian Zeller’s refracted drama about dementia had its English-language premiere at the Ustinov in Bath. That production, with Kenneth Cranham as the disorientated André, had three runs in London; Frank Langella took the part on Broadway, and Anthony Hopkins plays André in a forthcoming film version, directed by Zeller. The French playwright has since rounded off a family trilogy with The Mother and The Son, also translated by Christopher Hampton, along with several other meditations on marriage. But it is The Father, with its shades of King Lear, that has become Zeller’s signature piece, and it boasts a formidably challenging lead role, fluctuating between fury and fragility in a heartbeat.

In this Los Angeles production directed by Jessica Kubzansky, Alfred Molina – who is younger than his predecessors in the part by some years – seizes upon Zeller’s subtitle for the play: “a tragic farce”. Such was the overwhelming climactic pathos of Cranham’s performance in the original production, it is easy to forget the bustling humour of the play’s opening minutes, which give a double sense to André’s bewildered cry that “there’s something funny going on”.

Kubzansky wrings darkly ludicrous mirth from the scenes in which André and his daughter Anne (Sue Cremin) argue over his need for a carer. Having brandished a curtain rod to chase away his last helper, he mistakenly drops a bombshell on Anne’s partner, Pierre, letting slip that she has left him for an Englishman after 10 years together (“Oops a daisy!”).

This is the feverish ridiculousness and miscommunication of farce – even before André is seen flirting with a nurse while in his pyjamas. Molina attacks the comedy with all the gusto of a tap dancer – one of two jobs (the other being engineer) that we are invited to consider André as having held. But as the drama unfolds through André’s eyes, with scenes replayed in alternative settings and with different actors sometimes playing the same character, we never quite know what to believe, and the short scenes spiral in a breakneck 90 minutes from absurdity to despair.

Seeing the play again, it is Zeller’s own engineering that grows conspicuous and there is something a little too coldly schematic about it. A passing reference to a lost watch would give enough of a sense that André’s days are out of joint; instead the symbolism loses power through repetition. This is a piece that both shows and tells too often when one or the other would be fine.

Molina is tremendous, veering from easy confidence to deep unease, and it is striking how many of his lines are questions. But the other performances are not as deeply felt, and neither is the ricocheting impact of André’s condition on the rest of his family. In the conversation in which Anne and Pierre attempt to change the subject from her father’s future – an effort that lasts just seconds – there isn’t the sense of bone-tired exhaustion that the exchange requires.

David Meyer’s handsome design has the panel-walled, book-lined apartment that is practically de rigueur for Zeller. The gradual disappearance of the apartment’s furniture, leaving André isolated, is superbly effective and makes a striking visual contrast to the precarious haul of baggage that dangled above the troubled adolescent in The Son at the Kiln in London. What both plays make uncomfortably clear is that every parent will always be a child too.

• At the Pasadena Playhouse, Los Angeles, until 1 March.