THERE are few theatre productions which have received as much acclaim as quickly as Florian Zeller’s play The Father.

A heartfelt story of an 80-year-old former tap dancer suffering with his fast failing mind, the play’s English translation fronted my veteran actor Kenneth Cranham has received swathes of five stars reviews.

The Scottish-born Cranham has been at the centre of the acclaim for his touching portrayal of Andre.

The 80-year-old is no longer sure of his past, was he ever a tap dancer? Perhaps he was an engineer? Perhaps his daughter does not live with him and she actually lives in London?

All Andre knows for sure is he cannot find his watch and he is losing control.
Ahead of the play’s highly anticipated run at the Theatre Royal Brighton, Henry Holloway talks to Cranham moments after he stepped off the stage following a matinee at Richmond Theatre, London.

The Guide: First things first, how did this afternoon’s matinee go?
Kenneth Cranham: It went really well and it was a very good house. For some reasons this is quite a good matinee production, it suits the afternoon. You find very often when you play a matinee the people in the audience are people who really want to see it. Sometimes in the evening they have been brought or along, or just do not really want to be there.

How long does it normally take you to recover from a performance? Is this quite an emotionally draining role?
It does not take too long, but without seeing it you can never really know what it is like. What the author describes it as is a tragic farce. That used to rather befuddle us when we first did the play. We used to ask, what does that mean? But we found out what it means in the playing of it  because some of it is very funny. We manage to be in the same strand of narrative very funny and very moving, which is really want you want as an audience isn’t it?

Why do you think this has struck such a chord with audiences?
I think the audience finds it very moving because it is a play about all of us. It is about alzheimers, even though that word is never mentioned, but it affects so many of our lives. My own father had Parkinsons, so it is something I know something about. So many people in the audience have an experience of the situation which is what the play is about. In ordinary terms it could be called What Are We Going To Do With Dad? Sometimes it happens when there is no mother anymore and it is just the man is on his own. He starts not to be able to look after himself but out of pride, or whatever, he just hangs on in there and denies there is anything wrong with him.

It is something which a lot of people empathise with, so on a personal level what has the audience reaction been like?
I have actually had this extraordinary letter from a man about it. 

What did he say?
He said ‘It has taken a quite amazing piece of theatre to help me put into place an understanding of the confusion and fear which must exist in my father’s mind and it has helped me towards some partial understanding about what is happening to him. I am sure you will understand when I say as I am 6 foot plus 16 stone former rugby player, with broken nose, public displays of emotion are not really part of my normal image. But I spent the latter half of performance with tears streaming down my face’. 

When you read something like that, does it really resonate with you the impact this play is having on people?
There is a David Mamet book which says theatre never has any influence on anything, but a friend of mine read the letter and just said ‘this is proof this is not so’. But apart from that it does exist in its own right as a very good piece of theatre.

The confusion and fear referenced in the letter must be quite powerful, how did you get inside the mind of Andre?
I did not really understand it until we started performing it. The audience see the play through Andre’s experience of what is happening to hum. There is a woman I know who partly works in an old people’s home and she says all the thing’s Andre is obsessed by are classic Alzheimers conditions and situations. Lines like ‘I keep losing all my things’ or ‘everyone is helping themselves’. That is what they think, they think they cannot keep tabs on their possessions and everyone is stealing from them. I do not want to sound grim though, it is a very vivid piece of theatre and it is only an hour and a half. My agent said to me ‘this is your Lear’ and it is a modern day Lear in a way, Lear just stripped down to Lear and Cordelia. 

Do you have any fears about ageing which you drew upon for the role?
What Andre does is is he constantly losing his watch and goes looking for it. When we were rehearsing I actually lost my own watch for three months. I knew it would turn up eventually but I am experiencing what I hope are not the foothills of Alzheimer’s.

The peak of all the acclaim must have been winning the Olivier Award?
It was fantastic. My wife and daughter, who is a drama school, were there so it was fantastic for them as well. It was not something I had thought about much. When I was 50, 21 years ago, I was up for an award them as the Inspector in An Inspector Calls. I was up against Robert Stephens and Paul Scofield, so I was the boy then and now I am the old man. I won it over Mark Rylance, but you could probably fill a bowling alley with all the awards he has got. So it probably did not matter much to him. 

You have been touring The Father on and off for more than a year and a half, is it quite draining?
I find it quite exhilarating. The structure of the play is such I have an enormous amount of work in the first four scenes and then the play becomes about the people trying to deal with Andre. I can keep going on, it is fine. The problem is when you are doing a Shakespeare play which is three and a half hours long twice a day.

You have done a lot of screen  work recently, do you have a preference?
There are less differences than people think. When we first started doing The Father it was in a theatre with just 120 seats so it was not that different from acting in front of a camera. Really theatre acting is just a louder version of screen acting. 

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