The week on stage, from The Forest to Broken Wings

It’s not been quite as exemplary a week as usual when it comes to newly opened shows – but even flawed plays leave you feeling something, and this week’s offerings certainly did. Next week, we’ll be reviewing the likes of Henry V, Red Pitch and The Collaboration.

The Forest – Hampstead Theatre ★★★☆☆

It is tempting to call The Forest a puzzle – but to do so would be to imply that the pieces fit together. Florian Zeller’s compelling but befuddling play is full of shifting identities, repeated and mutating scenes and an increasingly deranged amount of flowers. It all adds up to a strange and unsteady whole. A somewhat unsatisfying one, too.

Pierre, played by Toby Stephens, is a celebrated surgeon married to Laurence, played by Gina McKee. Or perhaps I should say that Pierre, played by Paul McGann, is a celebrated surgeon married to Laurence, played by Gina McKee. Nothing is ever the same twice. Pierre is having an affair with a younger woman (Angel Coulby), who is increasingly becoming a problem. Both Stephens and McGann give tremendously pathetic performances, baulking and quivering at the mess Pierre has got himself into, and never shying away from the moments of cowardly cruelty.

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That the women appear to have no identity beyond their relation to the men is perhaps the point, though it doesn’t work for me. Zeller is clearly fascinated by the duality of man – how men shift their identities, how they put on masks – but in exploring that duality, he renders the women insignificant. Still, piecing together a kaleidoscopic narrative that is handed to you in fragments is engrossing enough. I just can’t shake the feeling that Zeller has got a little lost in his own puzzle. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Alexandra Pollard

Read the full review here.

Broken Wings – Charing Cross Theatre ★★☆☆☆

In recent years we have celebrated stories interested in grey areas, liminal spaces where conclusions are never clear and the lives portrayed on stage are realistically messy. But sometimes the clear-cut Disney world of good vs evil beckons – easily digestible in its clarity and moral absolutes. Broken Wings is a slice of that escapism. Though not a very satisfying one.

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The musical is an adaptation by Nadim Naaman of Kahlil Gibran’s biographical novel. Its story, some variation on which you’ve seen countless times, unfolds in Beirut where a man, having emigrated to Boston, returns home and falls head over heels for a woman. It’s that magic, all-encompassing, 18-year-old kind of love expressed in soaring ballads and broad clichés. Only their love is foiled by an evil bishop and his nefarious, moustache-twirling nephew.

Striking musical numbers manage to breathe life into the adaptation, but Broken Wings plays out a stunted, weighted story that never lets its performers take flight. Annabel Nugent