Theater and book reviews: how to portray a dream

The Mother

By Florian Zeller (translated by Christopher Hampton)

Starring Isabelle Huppert and Chris Noth

Atlantic Theater Company

Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan

February 24, 2019

The Unconsoled

By Sir Kenji Ishiguro

Portraying dreams, altered consciousness, and mental illness is a challenging business. How does the artist put the viewer/reader in the distorted mindset of the affected person, yet maintain narrative coherence, often limited in the aforementioned states? I’ve recently experienced to different approaches to this. Neither completely succeeded, but each was an intriguing entry into the disordered mind.

The Mother (2010) is the fifth play of French novelist and playwright Florian Zeller (b. 1979). His best-known play Le Père (The Father) came two years later and explored the mind of a man with dementia. Like it, The Mother uses fragmented narrative and nonlinear structure to convey the mind of a woman (Isabelle Huppert) who is popping sleeping pills. 

She is depressed (perhaps clinically) because of the perceived loss of her son (who has moved out of the house and in with his girlfriend) and husband (Chris Noth of Law and Order) who is away on business, and in her mind, having affairs. The play is interestingly structured, constantly repeating scenes and dialogue as might happen in a dream: the husband leaves for a trip, the son returns home (or does he?), the family visits her in a hospital room after an overdose of pills. Each scene circles back and is revisited with fragments of the same dialogue and elements of the same narrative, but each retake changes in ways large and small, both in the emotions of the participants (alternatively angry, sympathetic, sad, frustrated) and in the exact sequence of events (the husband is late for the train or is not, the son comes home or does not). I think the playwright is less trying to portray the mind of a depressed person than of a sedative-overdosed person. The play mostly succeeds in this, largely due to Isabelle Huppert, the French megastar from the films Elle, Amour, and The Piano Teacher.  She did a terrific job, on stage for all of the 90 minute single act play, and delivered an acting tour de force within the bounds of her role.  Her sultry French successfully added a fantasy-like aura to the drama, when counterposed to the New York accents of the other actors. The other efforts to portray surreality or dreaminess were less successful. The plain, rather photographic set (white leather chairs, black backdrop) and lack of sound design gives a bleak starkness to things that was not quite consistent with my vision of a distorted multisensory dreamscape of a drug high. An attempt at sensory distortion was tried by Director Trip Cullman and set designer Mark Wendland by making the straight line of leather sectional chairs artificially long and distorted, along with a mirror projecting at an odd angle into the room. But these devices were not quite enough to really contribute a real aura of delirium. Additionally, the playwright’s dialogue itself is mostly rational and delivered with clipped efficiency by the actors. While this creates a tension between reality vs. fantasy, it ultimately prevented me from truly entering the dreamscape of the mother. I’d like to see the playwright’s The Father, which critics felt more successful in entering a disordered mind. This play was a good try that did not quite succeed at putting me inside an altered state of a drug overdose.

A similar near-miss comes in the dreamscape evoked in renowned British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel The Unconsoled (1995). Ishiguro (b. 1954) is known for his novels about people who are distanced from society, e.g. the loyal British butler in denial over his personal life and the infamy of his employer in Remains of the Day (1989), or the teenagers cloned for organ harvest in the dystopian Never Let Me Go (2005). Some have seen these stories as a commentary on the author’s never feeling really integrated into British society after migrating from Japan early in his life. In The Unconsoled, for over 300 pages a famed concert pianist wanders about a small Germanic town that has invited him to play a recital, and perhaps to mediate an unclear social conflict. The purpose of his visit slowly changes as the book goes on. Perhaps he has an ex-wife there, perhaps a child. There is mostly non-lucid discussion of music theory which oddly seems to be of much interest to the townspeople, to the point of conflict and hatred. Names of imaginary composers and pieces drift in and out of the narrative, along with real composers like Liszt and Chopin. Short walks turn into endless uphill slogs. Rooms exit into other buildings seemingly miles away. And the pianist cannot take even a brief stroll without being imposed upon for some large or small task, so that he never really gets to try out the recital piano. There is even a hilarious scene when he has to speak publicly, but realizes he is naked in front of the formally dressed populace. Besides this catalog of common dream/nightmare scenarios, the book may be a clever commentary on how fame brings the loss of personal autonomy and control over one’s life, a phenomenon Ishiguro would doubtless have experienced in the years after Remains of the Day became a bestseller and renowned movie. I admired the author’s cleverness and interweaving of music into the book. In the end, like The Mother, it fell a bit short of evoking a surreal dreamscape. But then again, so did Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for all its fun. Maybe this is not a human experience so amenable to conventional theater or writing, but instead to surrealist artists like Salvador Dali.