Rory Kinnear gives a masterclass in fragile masculinity in Force Majeure

Force Majeure

Donmar Warehouse, London

As Tomas, Ebba and their two children step on to the stage of the Donmar Warehouse, they are confronted with a slippery slope, in more senses than one. Tim Price’s new play Force Majeure is based on Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film of the same name, in which an Alpine holiday reveals ravine-sized cracks in an apparently happy family.

As in the film, a bite to eat in a picturesque mountain restaurant turns into a nightmare when a controlled avalanche (intended to disperse snow safely) goes awry, threatening to bury them all in tons of snow. As the mighty wall of white bears down upon them, Ebba (played by Lyndsey Marshal) throws her arms protectively around the children. Tomas (Rory Kinnear), however, grabs his phone and does a runner. To say things become icy afterwards would be putting it mildly.

One of the great joys of Michael Longhurst’s production is the way it rises, gleefully, to the sizeable challenge of creating an Alpine landscape on a pocket-sized stage. Jon Bausor’s set, lit with chilly brilliance by Lucy Carter, fills the space with a pristine white slope that doubles as the snowy mountainside and the plush carpets of the hotel bar and bedroom. Cool, dayglo-clad skiers whizz down a ski-slope, burst through the space and zip past audience members, or glide with enviable sangfroid to a halt (choreography by Sasha Milavic Davies).

In contrast, the precariousness of the family foursome, as they totter about the tilting stage in clumpy ski boots, trying to control skis, poles and runaway suitcases, emphasises the central metaphor while adding to the dark comedy of the situation. The avalanche itself is terrifying — a vast thundering rumble of white mist and chaos that plunges across the stage and out into the auditorium.

The palpable chill that rolls across the stalls as it passes serves to amplify one of the questions of the story: faced with potential extinction yourself, what would you have done? It’s a dilemma that spreads its icy fingers into the cast as Tomas’s old mate Mats (Sule Rimi) and his new girlfriend Jenny (Siena Kelly) arrive for a casual drink, to be met with Ebba, drunk and incandescent, and Tomas, surly and defensive. The guests’ desperate semaphore behind their hosts’ backs is both funny and toe-curling and before long they are knee-deep in frozen wastes of their own.

Meanwhile the emotional avalanche set in motion by Tomas’s cowardice gathers pace and weight. For Marshal’s excellent Ebba, it’s not the act itself but the cover-up that sends her off-piste, as Tomas seeks to reframe the event. Marshal deftly demonstrates how rightful anger flirts with self-righteousness. Kinnear is superb at scoping the byways of self-pity and sullen defiance of the cornered male human and at conveying how, behind it all, lies a crippling self-loathing. The two children (played by Florence and Henry Hunt at the performance I saw) tip from solipsistic indifference into genuine fear of their parents breaking up.

It’s an astute exploration of relationships, family dynamics, gender expectations and a certain sort of fragile masculinity. It touches too on the enraging phenomenon — all too frequent in public life — of lack of accountability: it’s Tomas’s refusal to apologise that does the real damage. And it all comes served with a nice side-dish of observational humour about holidays: the bickering in public and the pressures of sudden proximity. “We’re on holiday, we’re meant to be having a nice time,” cries Kinnear’s Tomas in exasperation at one point.

It’s more pointed and less subtle than the original. But it’s still horribly enjoyable. And it offers the considerable pleasure of a company attempting to stage the impossible (as did Touching the Void and Life of Pi) and calling on the imagination of the audience to meet them on the slopes.

To February 5, donmarwarehouse.com

★★★★☆

Folk

Hampstead Theatre, London

We shift to a gentler landscape for Folk, Nell Leyshon’s beautiful, beguiling play at Hampstead Theatre about the encounter between Cecil Sharp and Louie Hooper: a meeting that would kick-start Sharp’s influential collection of English folk music and song.

The focus is rural Somerset in 1903, evoked in Rose Revitt’s design for Roxana Silbert’s intimate production through minimal props and glowing, autumnal colours. Sharp, away from London on a quest for traditional songs, bumps into Louie Hooper when she comes to work as a maid, and with her finds a wealth of music passed down from her mother. Before long Sharp has encouraged Louie to sing for him so he can note down her songs. Louie is at first captivated — transfixed by the properties of the piano and the way melody can be captured in musical notation on a page. But her enchantment waivers when she hears how transcription can simplify a sound and evaporates entirely when Sharp presents her with the resultant book of songs, now “tidied” and arranged by him.

The arguments shoot back and forth. Sharp’s archive promises to preserve tunes that would otherwise be lost to time and to provide a trove of English songs for everyone to share. His dedication has indeed left that legacy. But does his endeavour also amount to appropriation? And by noting down the tunes, does he lose their protean quality? Louie is aghast at what she sees as theft of the songs she learned at her mother’s knee. How do you preserve an oral tradition and to whom do those songs belong?

Meanwhile Leyshon sketches in wider issues, such as industrialisation and its impact on traditional ways of life. Machines threaten to put Louie and her sister Lucy, both glovemakers, out of work and prompt John (Ben Allen), Lucy’s lover, to emigrate. They also smother the domestic production line where songs were passed from mothers to daughters. And while Sharp dreams of a new, “pure” and “English” music, Leyshon points up the incipient dangers in romanticised nationalism and the complexities of origin. Louie tells Sharp that her mother learned these “English” songs from her own itinerant gypsy father who collected them from all over.

Some of the arguments are a bit too blunt, particularly in the second act. But Leyshon’s play remains ambivalent and there is a lovely, lyrical quality to it. It catches too something elusive and true: the transcendent and transformative power of music. For all his learning, Simon Robson’s urbane Sharp cannot match Louie’s easy musicality and natural gift. When she demonstrates the way a rising note catches precisely the surge of springtime sap in the woods, he can only approximate the chord on the keyboard beside her. Mariam Haque holds the stage as Louie: shy, serious and diffident at first, she seems to glow when she sings and her brooding rage is withering. She’s complemented by Sasha Frost as Lucy, her sparky, more pragmatic, sister. A rich, tender drama about tradition and progress, culture and identity, loss and belonging.

★★★★☆

To February 5, hampsteadtheatre.com