Alexis Zegerman’s multi-layered family drama matches scientific authenticity with emotional intelligence

The family in Alexis Zegerman’s drama revolves around a brilliant veteran scientist, a pioneer in IVF, for which he is about to receive a prestigious award. However, Professor Richard Myers suffers from advanced Parkinson’s, so the satisfaction of this lifetime achievement is tempered with the pain of ill health, frustration at his problems with mobility and speech, and the resulting humiliation.

The septuagenarian’s large family – "a mishpocha of Myers" as one of them declares, using the Yiddish word for extended family – gathers in the imposing Manhattan mansion, where the ups and downs of a complicated family life have taken place over the years. It’s now the scene of confrontations and conciliations as his children, their partners, and his young granddaughter settle into bedrooms allocated by his nurturing, younger third wife Megan and share family meals where he presides and she provides.

If this sounds reminiscent of Arthur Miller, that’s no accident. Zegerman speaks of walking "in the shadow of greatness" in an interview shared in the programme. She also reveals that she wanted her big American family to have science at its beating heart, so she skilfully explores the ethics and realities of genetic inheritance and manipulation. The eponymous ‘fever syndrome’ is a real, devastating, inherited condition suffered by Richard’s granddaughter, 12-year-old Lily, whose body’s immune system is at war with itself, resulting in life-threatening fits. It’s no wonder her mother Dot is anxious to screen embryos as she and husband Nate embark on IVF to try for a second child.

Taking the body as a metaphor for family, Zegerman reveals internal struggles with surgical incisiveness, with material inheritance looming as everybody stands to inherit upon Richard’s demise.

On designer Lizzie Clachan’s multi-storey set, the family home is sliced open almost anatomically, so the audience gets to eavesdrop on a range of exchanges that are edgy, intimate and sometimes downright confrontational.

Roxana Silbert sensitively directs a large, pitch-perfect cast through the nuts and bolts of family relationships past and present. Robert Lindsay's Richard rages against his condition and his family, but does not play for sympathy, thus eliciting admiration rather than pity. The practical implications of his condition, described by Alexandra Gilbreath’s endlessly patient and devoted Megan, are frustrating, painful and demeaning.

The third wife, now mistress of the house, will always have an edgy relationship with the children of her predecessors and so it proves here, as Lisa Dillon’s abrasive Dot comes up against Megan’s tactful firmness. Nancy Allsop’s Lily is a wonderfully convincing pre-teen, mischievously sharing her surreptitious go on granddad’s stairlift on social media, which makes her entirely believable fits all the more shocking. That evokes sympathy for volatile Dot too and for her patient husband Nate (convincing Bo Poraj).

Richard’s twin sons, artist Thomas (Alex Waldmann) and cryptocurrency investor Anthony (Sam Marks) are chalk and cheese. Thomas arrives with his boyfriend Philip (Jake Fairbrother) and together they play out the tensions in their relationship in Thomas’s cramped boyhood bedroom. All three actors inhabit their roles especially sensitively.

At almost three hours, it feels long, but nonetheless it all makes for an engrossing, edge-of-the-seat drama.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Ellie Kurttz

The Fever Syndrome runs until Saturday 30 April. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Thu & Sat only). £10-£37. Hampstead Theatre, NW3 3EU. www.hampsteadtheatre.com