REVIEW: The Father – at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Tuesday, June 16 until Saturday, June 20, 2015.

CONFUSED? You bet, well at certain times - along with the key character, but there was never a need to make contact with that particular website as this really is the simplest of tragic tales which unfolds before our moistening eyes. Or is it?

Ageing Andre is confusion itself as dementia dominates his declining years. Through his eyes there are strangers in his Parisian flat, but are they? And can we be sure we are actually in that flat?

He could be at his caring daughter’s home, and it’s a second guess whether he was a tap dancer, as he tells his latest unwanted carer, or maybe an engineer. And was there a chicken in that shopping bag?

Confused. Not really as Florian Zeller’s original French text has been wonderfully and sympathetically translated by Christopher Hampton, who says he had a ‘close affinity’ with it, the kind of personal and emotional response required for him to take on the task.

And so, together with director James Macdonald’s caring hand on the tiller in this considerably unsettling story, we are compelled to question what is in the human mind. Seeing isn’t actually believing it would seem.

Made-for-the-part Kenneth Cranham - with his lived in face and white beard - is in outstanding form as Andre struggles to comprehend who he has been talking to and where he is, and draws great support from the excellent Claire Skinner as his daughter Anne, a woman who is desperate to lead her own life but caught in the trap of her love for her father. You really do feel for them both.

The shifting moments in Andre’s mind are illuminated, or maybe that should be blacked-out, by a darkened stage framed in bright lights while classical musical plays but gradually fragments along whichever diversion his mind is set on.

Which flat are we in, with which person are we? And why doesn’t his ‘favourite’ daughter Elise visit anymore? Andre can’t be sure and as some scenes are replayed, almost inside out, we worry and despair on his behalf over possible abuse and the slow erosion of his joviality into a broken man who is ‘losing all his leaves’.

The remainder of the cast - Colin Tierney as the charming on the surface Pierre, Jade Williams (Laura), Jim Sturgeon (Man) and Rebecca Charles (Woman) are on top form too as they rise to the time twists elicited in Macdonald’s astute directing.

This is a French classic and though it's disturbing in many ways it is at the same time completely riveting and totally endearing.