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.