The Son    
Kiln Theatre, London

FOLLOWING on from The Mother and The Father, The Son completes the trilogy of short plays by prizewinning Parisian writer Florian Zeller.

Having taken us into the nightmares of the middle-aged mother, whose life devoted to her son and husband has lost all meaning – the former’s flown the coup and the latter, she believes, is seeking interests elsewhere – and the disintegrating reality of the father slipping into Alzheimer’s, Zeller here explores the dark abyss of the teenager Nicholas drowning in a chronic clinical depression sparked by his parents’ divorce.

To their frustrated bewilderment, Nicholas has changed from a normal boy into an unresponsive and self-harming youth lost in his own misery. When he moves from living with his despairing mother to the home of his lawyer father and his new wife, he proceeds to trash their lives, symbolically depicted in a scene of physical destruction with which “normal” family life struggles to cope.

Laurie Kynaston’s Nicholas captures both the resentment of the demands made upon him by his aspiring father and the fear of what is happening to him as he slips deeper into the mental morass, yet the centre of interest lies principally with John Light’s anxious and guilt-laden father, Pierre.

A product of his own overbearing father, his own life begins to disintegrate in his desperate efforts to help his son whom he loves but cannot understand. Love is not enough.

As with the earlier plays, The Son is served by fine performances as it slips seamlessly from scene to scene. Carried by Christopher Hampton’s fluent translation from French it is less theatrically innovatory, with predictive signals to the audience — a gun in a cupboard — and none of the tantalising time shifts of The Father.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this view of modern angst is the repeated motif of characters myopically comforting one another. “Don't worry,” is the mantra. But they do.

Runs until April 6, box office: kilntheatre.com