The Height of the Storm
Opening Night: September 24, 2019
Closing: November 24, 2019
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Two legendary actors come together in one unforgettable story of a shared life and all of its complexities. Two-time Olivier and Tony Award® winner Jonathan Pryce (“Game of Thrones”, “The Two Popes”, “The Wife”, Miss Saigon) joins three-time Olivier Award winner Eileen Atkins (“The Crown”, Doubt, The Retreat from Moscow, Indiscretions) to bring the acclaimed West End sensation by Florian Zeller, and translated by Christopher Hampton (MTC’s The Father), to Broadway. For 50 years the lives of André and Madeleine have been filled with the everyday pleasures and unfathomable mysteries of an enduring marriage, until suddenly their life together begins to unravel, and this loving relationship is faced with the inevitability of change. Jonathan Kent (Long Day’s Journey into Night) directs this thrilling production The Times of London declares “a deeply moving new play that takes us to the edge of what it is to love.”
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September 24, 2019
The merciless forces of dementia, anxiety and depression, respectively, torment the protagonists of Florian Zeller’s family trilogy, The Father, The Mother and The Son, intricate dramatic puzzles in which the French playwright deftly drops the audience inside the confusion of his characters’ heads. All those states of psychological distress exert their cruel influence in The Height of the Storm. If the author’s bag of tricks is becoming familiar and the wispy drama is too fragmented to be fully satisfying, the commanding performances of Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins and the meticulous direction of Jonathan Kent nonetheless make this an affecting elegy.
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September 24, 2019
“Haunting” is a word critics overuse, but sometimes nothing else will do. Still, I’ll do my best to avoid it – after this review of The Height of the Storm, the thoughtful and engrossing new play by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, opening tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. See, haunting here makes extra sense because the word conjures haunted, and serves well this play of death and ghost-like presences and what happens when the living can’t let go of their beloveds. With just a few shifts in direction and a horror movie score, Height could be one of the best haunted house tales since Nicolle Kidman got spooked by The Others.
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September 24, 2019
The rest of the cast, all but one of them imported from last fall’s London production, do perfectly well as spotters for the stars’ maneuvers. And you have to admit that a playwright could do worse than creating a juicy acting exercise for treasurable actors in their 70s (Mr. Pryce) and 80s (Ms. Atkins). Does it matter so much that for all their skill — set off by Mr. Kent’s exquisitely decorous Broadway staging — there’s no there there? It does. Even if you accept that “The Height of the Storm” (as I wrote about “The Father”) is more of a vehicle than a destination, you may eventually grow weary of being taken for a ride.
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September 24, 2019
The heart breaks for the aged married couple who refuse to be separated, even after one of them dies. The only question is: Which one? In this Manhattan Theatre Club production of Florian Zeller’s “The Height of the Storm,” Jonathan Pryce gives an achingly sensitive performance as Andre, possibly “the greatest writer of his generation.” (We also met a man named Andre in the French playwright’s previous drama, “The Father,” a formidable figure as played on Broadway in 2016 by Frank Langella.) Here, Andre is a recent widower unable to cope with — or even bear to acknowledge — the death of his beloved wife, Madeleine, endowed with down-to-earth grace and emotional depth by the great Eileen Atkins.
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September 24, 2019
Zeller’s play, expertly translated by Christopher Hampton, continually leaves us as disoriented as André himself — “People who try to understand things are morons,” he says at one point — and the accumulation of contradictions is both unsettling and deeply moving. That is particularly true in the gut-check final scene, brilliantly lit by Hugh Vanstone, which is haunting in every sense of the word.
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