Ghosts

Rose theatre, Kingston

9 October 2013

A better trailer than drama usually gets. From here.

A slow progress from darkness and ghosts to light and tragedy.

A performance of Ghosts is extremely upsetting. That is too mild a term, but it conveys something of the nature of this great tragedy.

His friend and champion Edmund Gosse felt the best of Ibsen was elsewhere, which would be a staggering claim, except Gosse seems to have viewed Ibsen's work as literature more than drama, which must be experienced in the theatre.

Gosse was surely correct if he meant that none of the characters here are as compelling as some of Ibsen’s other creations; the interest is more plot-focussed, but that may also be said of Oedipus Rex and the tragedies of Racine.

To give an example of the master's theatricality, it is an incredibly painful irony that Helene’s self-realisation comes when it does. She becomes aware that she is inadvertently the cause of much of her own misery, as well as that of her husband, of Oswald and of Regina. This knowledge results in Regina’s immediate rejection, and as a result, Oswald’s terrible request of her.

In a novel, perhaps in another Ibsen drama, this self-realisation would be given greater prominence. Here it initiates the final turn of the screw of the plot, and the audience soon shares Helene’s dreadful situation, too awful to endure for long.

However, Helene (and too a lesser extent Oswald) is something of a heroic figure, and that is important. We care that she has, from the start, penetrated the veil of hypocrisy under which she was brought up. The drama is a machine moving around her struggle between outer and inner morality, a universal struggle as Ibsen makes clear.

That she cannot control the consequences is also universal, but she remains heroic, even gains in stature after her moment of self-realisation. Here, as elsewhere, Ibsen reclaims heroism for us, though he depicts a path no easier for us than say Achilles’ path was for classical Greeks.

This is the second production I’ve seen recently, and it’s hard not to compare with Richard Eyre’s gripping account.

Both productions are traditional. Stephen Unwin, like Eyre wearing both translating and directing hats, apparently honours the birth of Edvard Munch 150 years ago by basing the designs on those Munch suggested for Max Reinhardt. As a result, the set is slightly gloomier than Eyre’s, who chose a different painter (Hammershøi) for inspiration.  A back projection compensates with beautiful images of Norwegian mountains, the vast space contrasting with domestic suffering.

Unwin’s approach comes perilously close to being portentous. In a short drama, his version takes maybe 20 minutes longer than Eyre’s, and although he cuts less text, he also introduces more pauses. The slower tempo places great strain on the actors, especially Kelly Hunter’s Helene Alving, who sometimes seems to be stuck in a particular expression for a theatrical eternity, though probably just a few seconds objectively.

This weightiness is sometimes lightened by humour, especially involving Pip Donaghy’s Jakob Engstrand, a memorably rascally portrayal. The slower tempo also reveals the work’s symbolism of stifling interiors and rain-soaked exteriors gradually giving way, first to the light of a blaze, and then to the fateful dawn.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Unwin and Eyre is their realisation of Pastor Manders. Patrick Drury remains mostly calm, and so adds to the slower sense of this production. His Manders is entirely unsympathetic.

The final scene is as agonising as it must always be. For Eyre this caps a dizzying descent into tragedy, whereas for Unwin it is the climax of a gradual laying on of misery.

If in the end I prefer Eyre, this is still a masterful production of one of the most brutal depictions of the lies we need for our society.  It's touring: you should see it.

An Enemy of the People

BFI

29 September 2013

Trailer for the film.

Sadly, this simplistic tale of truth vs belief isn't likely to lose its relevance.

Part of the British Film Institute’s season of films by director Satyajit Ray, I imagine and hope this is one of the weaker instalments, though it has some merits.

As an interpretation of Ibsen’s serious comedy, this is worthless. Ray is fully sympathetic to his hero, so removes the original’s great misanthropic speech, and completely reverse the original climax: in Ibsen Dr Stockmann claims the strongest man stands alone, in Ray Dr Gupta is delighted he does not in fact stand alone.

It also isn’t really a cinema film, as it consists mostly of domestic scenes. The budget appears to be only a little more than an average TV drama from the period (1989), and that is probably the relevant comparison.

So this was effectively a TV drama about the politics of religion and science in a small Indian town. Despite Ray’s hopeful ending, suggesting that younger people will side with science over religion, the film fairly clearly makes the case that religion will actually win this battle.

Or rather, religion can be used by those in power to enrich themselves, and in democracy a dissenting view, even if correct, can be crushed. Ray’s doctor probably stands for a wider range of dissenters; it is simply that as he can prove his claims, he can more easily stand for all that is progressive.

As in Ibsen, Ray circles his protagonist with progressive youth, who will eventually champion him, and the progressive ‘establishment’ that will be co-opted by power and money.

For such a political, public, film, the family dimension is stressed more than in Ibsen. Gupta’s wife, played by Ruma Guha Thakurta with a profound sadness, stands by her man, though in the film’s greatest moment, she turns her back is to him when she reveals that she is religious and has been unhappy that he isn’t.

It’s the film’s only moment of great subtlety. There are other striking moments, for example two separate shots of Gupta hand-in-hand with either his wife or his daughter. These images are humane and given almost the level of importance of God’s outstretched hand to Adam in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but this serves to highlight the banal nature of the images’ surroundings.

Disease in the temple’s holy water. I can’t find a way to describe this without it forming a metaphor. In a contemporary interview in Sight & Sound, Ray himself described the film as being about pollution in the water, again a loaded phrase.

We can immediately see why this would create opposition among believers. By definition, holy water cannot be polluted, it cannot be diseased, it cannot be unclean. The potent clash inherent even in describing the situation is Ray’s single improvement on his source.

For Ibsen, there was no religious dimension in his drama – the polluted water was rather a symbol of our polluted society, in total.

Ray narrows his focus, and poorly illuminates a serious, and perhaps eternal, dilemma. While we can abstractly accept there is a gap between what we believe and what is actually true, we cannot easily live according to the truth. Indeed, as Nietzsche put it, in words Ibsen would have approved, we have art lest we perish of the truth.

Recording Hedda

New Diorama theatre

28 September 2013

The finale of Diana Rigg's performance of the central role. From here.

The core of Hedda Gabler survives this misguided ironic updating, though it would help if you know the original.

I don’t understand what special value was gained by this production’s reworking of Ibsen. A group of actors and writers are doing a radio recording of Hedda Gabler, though here it is claimed to be a new piece by one of the characters, Tansman.

He’s also hoping to stage the work, as a vehicle for his wife, G, the central character. He wants to stage it in an avant-garde theatre called the Black Box – the New Diorama stage here is basically a darkened box. So far, so self-referential.

The radio version quickly takes second place to the drama enacted behind-the-scenes, which turns out to be a fairly faithful updating of Ibsen, ‘vine leaves in his hair’ and all.

Towards the climax, the radio play and the ‘real life’ play merge imperceptibly. It’s all very postmodern, but in the worst sense of adding nothing and subtracting rather a lot.

If the original is wrongly felt to be melodramatic, then things are made much worse here, depicting actors in their studio. If Ibsen’s dialogue is wooden, this was no less wooden. The audience wonders whether these people overacting on purpose, because that is what they always do?

The updating makes some of Ibsen’s plot devices implausible – surely Tansman would text Løvborg to tell him he found his precious manuscript?

These anachronisms are jarring, but worse is the reduction of all the characters to drama professionals. Perhaps the bored daughter of a general would become an actress, though this surely requires more dedication than Hedda grants herself.

But reducing Judge Brack to an actor is disastrous – this monument to cynicism, dead inside as Hedda observes, loses much sense when he isn’t also a pillar of society.

If anything of Ibsen survives, it is at least the strongest part. Hedda is fascinating and absorbing, even here, where Sarah Head spends too much time searching the middle distance with her eyes.

Actually most of the actors do this, and it’s a sign the director hasn’t helped them understand their character – at one point G confesses she hasn’t grasped Tansman’s play… another painful self-referential moment, for I would suggest these actors didn’t grasp it fully either.

Still, for all that Hedda fascinates. This production doesn’t – cannot – make her any sort of a victim. Clearly she could divorce Tansman, or abort her unwanted pregnancy, options not easily open to Ibsen’s original. Even Brack’s blackmail carries little conviction here.

It’s possible to present Hedda as a victim, or as a monster, or bits of both. Here she is clearly a monster, though both charismatic and understandable, so that we cannot easily be appalled by her actions.

In this, the drama faithfully reflects an important aspect of Ibsen’s magnificent creation.

Ghosts

Almeida theatre

27 September 2013

A trailer inspired by paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi. 

Not really relevant to the the drama, but evocative.

A devastating analysis of family life, in the greatest production it is likely to receive.

This was one of the most harrowing experiences I have had in a theatre, a triumphant vindication both of Ibsen’s most affecting tragedy and of director Richard Eyre’s traditional approach.

I must admit that when I first saw the set, I feared this might turn out to be the kind of comfortable experience in the theatre that people in Ibsen’s own time expected, and which really hasn’t changed since.

But Eyre’s direction is so assured that Ibsen’s unfolding plot reduced me to an emotional wreck within the first few minutes. Thankfully both Ibsen and Eyre lighten the tone a little, providing enough breathing space that the tragic climax is almost unbearable when it comes.

Lesley Manville’s central performance of Helene Alving was astonishing. She appeared near sobbing at the curtain calls, and applauding seemed in bad taste – it really was as if we had just seen her kill her only son, and only remaining lifeline.

It wouldn’t have worked so well if the rest of the cast were any less impressive. Will Keen’s Pastor Manders in particular seemed close to apoplexy throughout, as Helene revealed the full situation, her misery and the terrible consequences of what he felt was the greatest struggle of his life in rejecting her.

In a production as good as this, the full impact of Ibsen’s dissection of our families could be realised, even though Eyre blended acts to permit the whole thing to be played without interval.

The most important of Ibsen’s revelations was given full significance. Helene realises that she played a role in making her husband unhappy; that both were trapped in a situation neither could control. The misery of the moment is almost unendurable but in fact we have to endure worse shortly afterwards.

What distinguishes this from other miserable dramas, what elevates it to tragedy, is Helen’s gradual self-realisation, and hence the tragic grandeur she achieves when she understands she must kill her son.

Everyone else, while important and well constructed characters, are important mostly because of the way they help Helene – and us – come to her understandings.

Everyone should see this production. And we should all be grateful for Manville in giving us this unique and terrible experience.

An Enemy of the People

Albany theatre, Deptford

25 September 2013

One of the most unlikely attempts at Stockmann's great anti-people speech, from Steve McQueen. 

Community pettiness and NGO arrogance equally lampooned in this updated production... almost.

Rebecca Manson Jones’ loose adaptation of Ibsen’s drama retains the spirit rather than the letter of the original, except in the final scene. She sensibly suggests this supposed comedy could be better called ‘the do-gooder’ in English.

The upright Dr Stockmann is here a former NGO campaigner, bringing ethically sourced palm oil to a Cornish village. The up-to-the-minute text, larded with references to tweeting and crowd sourcing, requires some barely plausible contortions to remain close to the original – the Stockmann siblings want to create a rival to Brighton in Cornwall, the local newspaper becomes a symbol of the end of the print age, and so on.

This updating doesn’t significantly alter the work, though I’m not sure Sarah Malin’s convincingly professional campaigner, working late on a media release, would genuinely encounter a ‘lightbulb moment’ in the great community hall speech scene.

If there is humour in this comedy, it is bitter, and at the expense of the idealistic Stockmann, whose family suffer as a consequence of his (in this case her) stand for the future, which achieves nothing in the present and indeed climaxes in a shocking denunciation of the rest of us.

Though right, at least in the beginning, during her great anti-democratic speech she sets herself against almost everyone, rather as Brand did in an earlier drama, and an audience that is paying attention should certainly question its sympathy with her.

This production brilliantly recreated the atmosphere of a community meeting, and asked the audience to vote on whether Stockmann was indeed a public enemy.

The majority sided with her, which is itself quite disturbing. Presumably we voted for her earlier self, the one Ibsen and Manson Jones succeed in making sympathetic, heroic. But are we really agreeing with her that we are upsided cockroaches with our legs twitching?

Ibsen surely knew better when he had his community reject Stockmann. Here, the final scene was a skilful piece of montage conveying an overall sense of hope. Only here did the adaptation differ from Ibsen in spirit, and I think for the worse. His version, with Stockmann confident but ruined, is more challenging.

Unlike many other great dramatists, Ibsen’s endings are important, for he drives us towards them with all the mechanical skill of the nineteenth century well-made play. So changing the tone of his endings is a serious mutilation; nor was the risk one worth taking here.

Aside from this limitation, everything else in this production worked wonderfully well. The Stockmann family was presented so naturalistically I thought the actors must be related. Elizabeth Elvin, in the role of the representative of the town’s small businesses, stole every scene she was in, but every cast member seemed to embody their role.

If only his ending could be preserved, I can’t imagine a better updating of Ibsen’s work: this should be seen.

Public Enemy

Young Vic, 31 May 2013

Why do I bother linking to trailers that give little idea of the drama? From here.

Ibsen's bitter 'comedy' loses much of its shockingly direct impact through a misguidedly understated production.

When the adaptation, director and star all conspire to ruin a piece, I am tempted to think it may be that I was mistaken in my high opinion of the original.

On reflection, though, I think rather that the production is simply mistaken, failing to grant sufficient power to the drama. Overall, while the updated set is bright, the acting is too low-key.

The critical scene is Dr Stockmann's rant to the assembly,  of course really the theatre audience itself, though I wonder how many of us are willing to accept the speech. It is the most direct assault on an audience in any major drama, excepting perhaps Shakespeare's Timon, and I find it deeply uncomfortable.

This Nietzschan diatribe against our slave selves and society makes me squirm, for I find the argument hard to refute, yet it seems to lead to autocracy or worse. As Stockmann exorts us to transcend our values, we ought to be thinking just how unlikely that is. 

I'm not sure any audience is really willing to hear this, but thankfully Ibsen was too great a dramatist to readily identify with his hero. So there are several ways a director can cushion the blow. Perhaps Stockmann has been driven mad by the town's persecution? Or, in the following scenes, he can seem self-ob sessed, the culmination of his earlier character? Or a connection can be made between his earlier, easygoing nature and his new 'strength'?

Of all these options, one of the worst would be to underplay the great denunciation, to have the doctor chummily engage with the audience as if he were a poor standup comedian. Yet somehow this is what adaptor David Harrower, director Richard Jones and actor Nick Fletcher contrive.

The production also highlights a weakness in the original, where Stockmann's speech moves without warrant from specific criticisms to bitter generalisations worthy of Timon. Part of the problem here is Harrower's editing, which reduces the sense of gradual erosion in the doctor that is present in the original. 

After the great speech, which has an impact even when traduced as here, Jones emphasises the self-obsessed side of Stockmann, a reasonable decision, but one that further weakens his criticisms of us.

The final moments, however, are very effective, partly because either Jones or Charlotte Randle moves one of Stockmann's lines to his wife, then proceeds to give her a potent half-laughing half-crying response to her husband's pathetic final repeated claims of strength. 

Actually Randle gives a great performance throughout, absolutely riveting. Her character is ambiguous in Ibsen, and could be portrayed as either critically supportive or as a desperate mother forced to stay with her impossible husband. Randle opts for the latter.

Hedda Gabler

Old Vic, 11 September 2012

 

 

A misleading frills and fiddles trailer

 

A shattering experience, both in the theatre and on reflection afterwards. This is always my experience of Ibsen.

 

Partly, this is due to technique. He is the supreme exponent of the ‘well made’ five act drama, so popular in the nineteenth century, in which a stove as a piece of scenery in Act One will surely play a more significant role in Act Four, as indeed it does here, with Hedda burning her former lover’s masterpiece, a destruction shockingly equated with burning his child by Thea Elvsted.

 

But it is also due to his choice of subject. He brings the heroic, the sense that these events are portentous, that they matter, into the drawing room.

 

Previous dramatists had represented the fate of nations across the stage. Ibsen applied the same approach to the fate of individuals in situations we can all identify with. The amazing thing is that this works.

 

After we have learned to dislike her, Hedda reveals that her malice and arrogance arise from something terrifying, deep within herself – something that Judge Brack, to whom she has confessed, ascribes to feminine caprice.

 

This short dialogue , partly elaborated by Friel in his translation, is magnificent; Hedda’s repulsive pettiness is a response to feeling trapped and inadequate to life. Brack’s conventional hedonism is exposed when he is unable to comprehend her problem.

 

Hedda’s annihilating impulses are consequently first directed at her former lover and his mistress, then more successfully towards herself and her unborn child.

 

Are these impulses justified, given her sensibility and predicament? We’re drawn to her (or ought to be) even as we contrast her with her only serious rival in the drama, idealistic, single-minded Thea Elvsted.

 

It is one of Ibsen’s ironies that Hedda is the one described as ‘determined’, when she – and we, if we have eyes and ears – fully realise that the word better describes Thea. Hedda has a stronger sense of the futility of action, and so vacillates, Hamlet-like, until her final, dreadful aesthetically-charged suicide. Thea survives, and will resurrect her child, the ‘beautiful’ last masterpiece of their shared lover.

 

This final ambiguous situation is marvellously accentuated in Anna Mackmin’s production, entirely impressive apart from one now common misjudgement.Humour is now jarringly played up in Ibsen as much as in the past it was drearily played down, and I wonder if the pendulum will eventually stabilise.

 

As an aside, I’m massively relieved that the production was neutral on the proto-feminist aspects of Hedda’s situation – why try to relegate this universal drama to a museum piece?

 

I thought the standout performance was Fenella Woolgar’s Thea. In body language and voice, she absolutely convinced me that she was focussed to the point of hysteria. Sheridan Smith was impressive in the title role, although she was too convincing at its supposedly ‘capricious’ aspect, then almost remedied that through her silent horror when fully realising her situation in the final act.

 

The supporting cast were faultless. Let’s hope we get to see more of this neglected master.