IBSEN'S GHOSTS
Duchess Theatre
22.02.10
Rain on the windows of the Alving house – a coldly elegant anteroom, conservatory behind. Little hint of the fjords beyond, and a feeble fire at the orphanage.
Captain Alving's ill-fated memorial takes centre stage, though, in the form of a detailed scale model, sitting between Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders in the opening scene.
She was Lesley Sharp, an intense, haunted performance, but often with a wry, weary smile. He was Iain Glen, also making his début as a director here. A strong presence, almost Paisleyan in his religious ranting, except that the accent was hard to pin down, and he did rather too much striding and prowling.
Excellent support from the two youngsters: Jessica Raine as the maid, and Harry Treadaway as the doomed bohemian who returns to the family home, his mind broken by the sins of his father.
Malcolm Storry was a fine Engstrand, the manipulative artisan who flatters, cajoles and threatens to manipulate the Pastor and the girl who called him father.
Ibsen's tragedy leaves the truth half-spoken, Oswald's end unclear. Frank McGuinness, now as well known for his versions of the classics as for his own work [Someone Who'll Watch Over Me] uses a modern vernacular, with hints of poetry, and of anachronism. Sharp, at any rate, manages to make her lines sound natural and spontaneous, until finally words fail her, and she sinks to the floor with a bestial moan.
Glen's is a worthy revival of a play which speaks differently to each successive generation, though not I think an historic production: Glen is too shallow, and Sharp, though a fine actress, lacks the tragic depth that Dench or Ashcroft could bring to the role.
1 comment:
As a young man, Ibsen bought Peer Gynt from a starving poet and set
himself up as a pretender to being a playwright. Then, in Germany, he
was killed in a bar fight, and a group of young German writers wrote
his plays for a while as a joke, eventually hiring an out-of-work
actor to impersonate him. My book will decode all of the jokes the
playwrights wrote into the plays in code, though anyone can tell Peer
Gynt was written by a different author than the one who wrote Hedda
Gabler. Further stylistic analysis, date comparisons and research will
be provided. See the upcoming TV special.
We have established that more than one writer wrote Ibsen's plays, and
will reveal our data more completely in the book. However, as can be
seen clearly from the style of language Ibsen used, one of the writers
(called "Ibsen 4" in the study) is clearly speaks danish fluently.
And, we believe there is a case that Ibsen 4 was the dramaturg for the
group, engineering the plots and mechanics of the plays. To reveal one
exciting finding of the study, it is clear that the cabal of
playwrights who actually wrote so-called Ibsen's works were women.
certainly, any reasonable person will not find it odd that a woman in
that oppressed day and age would both write "Hedda Gabler" and be
unable to publish it because of the repression of her gender.
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