A beautiful, frustrating bore: Florian Zeller’s The Forest, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

The Forest is the latest thriller from the French dramatist Florian Zeller, translated by Oscar winner Christopher Hampton. It’s a well-worn yarn of adultery, betrayal and vengeance set among the yuppie classes. The action is located in France but the actors speak in Home Counties accents. (In theory, at least. Some are better at imitating BBC newsreaders than others.) Zeller makes his story deliberately arty and obscure. Man 1, also known as Pierre, is a wealthy doctor whose wife, or ‘The Wife’, is played by Gina McKee. Pierre has a hysterical girlfriend, known as ‘The Girlfriend’, who threatens to reveal their affair and destroy Pierre’s marriage. The Girlfriend dies bloodily in their love nest. But was this suicide? Or did she get whacked by Russian mobsters whom Pierre met, rather improbably, through contacts in the pharmaceutical industry?

Instead of clarifying matters, Zeller tinkers with the mechanics of the narrative and keeps backtracking and retelling the story from alternative points of view.