After Christopher Hampton saw Zeller’s dementia drama on stage in Paris, neither language, finance nor another film adaptation could thwart their collaboration on the screenplay
I first met Florian Zeller about eight years ago. It was in the foyer of the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris, where I had just watched his play The Father, directed by Ladislas Chollet, with the astonishing 88-year-old French actor Robert Hirsch in the title role. I was pretty much overwhelmed by what I’d seen, but I think I was able to convey to Florian that I loved his play and hoped he would allow me to translate it.
The Father was not the first play of Florian’s that I had seen. The year before, also in Paris, I’d watched a very deft and amusing comedy called The Truth and had been saying to whom it might concern that, providing a really gifted director could be found (because the play required razor-sharp precision and considerable wit and timing), I was confident a British audience would embrace it. What struck me now, however, having seen The Father, was how remarkable it was that a playwright in his early 30s could have written two such radically different plays, with nothing in common beyond the skill of their construction.