The Height of the Storm

 

Jericho Arts Centre to February 9, 2025
Tickets from $30 at 604-224-8007 or www.unitedplayers.com

Posted January 19, 2025

Someone has died. Maybe someone has died. French playwright Florian Zeller keeps us guessing in this elusive, fascinating play translated by Christopher Hampton.

The Height of the Storm, directed by Adam Henderson for United Players, is bewildering but tantalizing; it’s sad but not a tear-jerker; it’s scary but not an adrenaline  rush; and it addresses reality: if memory completely informs the lives of the living, can we say the dead have really ceased to exist? As André, the main character in Zeller’s play, says, “You think people are dead but that’s not always the case.”

We meet André (Jerry Wasserman) at the top of the play, motionless, his back to us, staring out his window at a passing storm. Voice-over repeats garbled fragments of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Time present and time past.” A poet in his seventies or eighties, André appears absorbed in thought.  Anne (Deborah Vierya) arrives and with forced cheerfulness and efficiency, urges André to sit down. “Organizing. That’s what I’m here for.” His daughter? A care-giver?

And then, soon, there is Madeleine (Christine McBeath), André’s wife – maybe; she has been out shopping, she tells André when he asks where she has been. Élise (Jade Prechelt) – “the other one”, André calls her – arrives and eventually also her new lover who may or may not be a realtor. A huge bouquet of flowers is delivered to the door with no card. Madeleine, clearly annoyed, says, “I did say no flowers.” Aha.

André interacts with the three women as if all four of them are present. But when a sexy younger woman (Cara McDowell) turns up and talks about her shared past in Paris with André, he gets upset and angry. Later, when Madeleine, Élise and Anne discuss André, he is clearly distraught: “I’m here. I’m here. Look at me. I’m still here.”

Wasserman’s portrayal is brilliant: with absolute fluidity and seamlessness he shifts from a cheerful loving husband and father, through anger and frustration to utter despondency and vacancy. But in André’s kitchen scenes with Madeleine, Wasserman is warm, a little flirtatious as he calls her, “my little scorcher” and applauds her – almost boyishly – for the mushroom and onion dish that she makes for him. As Madeleine, McBeath is down-to-earth, uncomplicated, natural, cheerful but sometimes short-tempered with André – a woman making allowances, perhaps, for being married to a poet. Theirs seems to be a comfortable if not a perfect marriage.

As the daughters Anne and Élise, Vieyra and Prechelt are not close but they get along: Anne is all nervous energy, constantly running her fingers through her hair while Élise seems to be a latter-day flower child, going from lover to lover. McDowell plays the Woman as a femme fatale in a silky dress with lots of décolletage, sheer black stockings and high heels; she sashays provocatively around the room while André, distraught at this point, either does not remember her or remembers her only too well. The Woman, however, can’t be sure whether her recollections are about André or their mutual friend Georges.

The cast is completed by Andy Oshima as Paul, who may be a realtor, but spends much of the later part of the play sharpening a knife in the background.

Set design, lit by Ben Paul, representing a kitchen and study, is by Emily Dotson. Sound design by Adam Henderson.

And so the mystery builds. You will take away from The Height of the Storm what you want or what you need. I was deeply affected by the character’s utter sense of being lost, particularly one in cognitive decline, when a long-term relationship ends. When complete dependency is shattered, how does one move on?

And here an unqualified shout out to United Players, a self-described ‘non-professional’ theatre company that consistently offers exciting, provocative fare that out-performs many of Vancouver’s professional companies. The trick has been – beginning with former artistic director Andree Karas and continued by Rodgers – to lure professional directors to the company. The bait? A chance to direct plays that no other company will risk or can afford to mount (sometimes because of the cost of large casts). Once a professional director is on board, the not-yet-professional actors continue to rise to the occasion; professional actors begin to offer their services, too. It’s a formula for success. Some years ago, when Michael Frayn’s Democracy, directed by Adam Henderson, sold out night after night, United Players threw caution to the wind and rented the Vancouver Playhouse where they filled the house. That’s gutsy.

The Height of the Storm is gutsy, too. It will not please everyone; it is not a feel good play. But without doubt there is hardly anyone who hasn’t been or isn’t presently experiencing someone in their life with dementia and for whom time past and time present are utterly fragmented.