Review: FORCE MAJEURE, Donmar Warehouse

With an avalanche bearing down on you, do you run towards safety or towards your children?

Ruben Östlund's film took that question and, with plenty of dark comedy and ambiguity stirred into the mix, fashioned a movie that was a favourite on the festival circuit and became one of those films that, if you saw it, you needed to talk about it. Eight years on, its themes are still as Zeitgeisty as ever and, in Tim Price's stage adaptation, given an immediacy that ups the intensity - not least when the avalanche comes towards you!

Rory Kinnear invests his Tomas with the complacency of the 21st century distracted father - checking the phone for emails, shouting instead of persuading, performative rather than loving. He's the kind of man who "babysits his own kids" - well, he makes a lot of money at work and provides nice holidays for them, so...?

Ebba (Lyndsey Marshal, wound up to 11) has had just about enough of the father and husband who is "there but not there" with the avalanche incident pushing her over the edge into hostility and an undermining of Tomas's inflated alpha-male ego that slashes through the thinning threads that bind them. But what of the future?

Summarised so, the plot can sound a little soapy and there are times (especially when shouting is required - for once, not as a proxy heightened emotions but as indication of communication problems) when the play does have a touch of Eastenders about it. That said, the dissection of a 21st century marriage is rendered with a sharp scalpel of satire and there will be few fathers in the audience who will remain squirm-free for the two hours or so running time.

In staying loyal to his film source, Price both adds and subtracts from the material's power in transitioning it from screen to stage. The two kids (Florence Hunt, a mardy teen and Henry Hunt, at the cute but irritating stage - both excellent) are a bigger presence and the play benefits from it. So too the intermittent skiers and workers who provide lighter comedy in a range of cameo roles, showing it's not just middle-aged men who can milk their sense of entitlement and that all that expensive branded equipment might not be affordable on eight euros an hour.

The energy dips when cougar about town, Charlotte, presents a more liberal view of motherhood to Ebba, Nathalie Armin given little chance with an underwritten part. Tomas's ski buddy, Mats (Sule Rimi) and his new young girlfriend Jenny (Siena Kelly), also feel a little surplus to requirements, especially in their long sleepless night of argument.

The deliberate ambiguity of the movie's ending delighted and infuriated audiences in equal measure, but the play removes much of the finale's equivocation and feels a little too explained, a little too neat as a result. Nevertheless, director Michael Longhurst and designer Jon Bausor, have done a fine job in solving the not inconsiderable problems of bringing a film set on a large mountain and in a gigantic hotel to a small stage, adding much to the intensity of the central relationship, now hemmed into a space as small physically as it is psychologically.

Force Majeure is at The Donmar Warehouse until 5 February

Photo Marc Brenner

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