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Shows Worth Seeing:
John Gabriel Borkman
By Henrik Ibsen
BAM Harvey Theatre
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Box office: 718-636-4100
The British actor Alan Rickman is looking
like the white knight of serious theater in New York these days.
The Donmar Warehouse production of Strindberg’s Creditors
he brought to BAM last year crackled with such emotional
intensity and actorly honesty that it ended up as the season’s
high point for many theatergoers. Now an Abbey Theatre production
of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman starring Rickman
has arrived that is scarcely less meaty and satisfying. Borkman
(1896), Ibsen’s penultimate play, is a masterpiece with
a small following. Seldom produced because of its grim chilliness,
it is an extraordinary creation that pushes the boundaries of
what most people think of as Ibsen’s realistic métier.
Some consider it a modern tragedy. It is certainly the closest
any author has come to demonstrating that tragedy (or something
like it) is possible with complexly unattractive and ambivalent
modern characters.
The story is equally timely and timeless.
The character of Borkman is part Bernie Madoff and part frustrated
Billy Elliott. A former bank manager who went to prison for illegally
appropriating other people’s money, he is also the son of
a miner who clawed his way into middle-class respectability by
denying his impulses toward poetry and his obligations toward
love. Renouncing his beloved Ella for the sake of a man who he
thought could help him in business, Borkman married Ella’s
sister Gunhild instead, and as the play begins eight years after
his release from jail, Gunhild is a figure of such icy, implacable
determination that she seems drawn from Greek tragedy. Much of
the action consists of these three "shadows" bickering
and deluding themselves that they might achieve worldly redemption
through Erhart, John and Gunhild’s son. Erhart, for his
part, is a bright-eyed young man who understandably wants nothing
more than to escape with his girlfriend and enjoy life.
The acting is pitch-perfect. Rickman's
famous command of haughty surliness is just the right skill for
breathing life into Borkman’s grotesque flights of arrogant
self-justification. More impressive, he has figured out how to
make the character’s numerous, sudden shifts into mystical
poetry believable and moving. Fiona Shaw is just as believable
as vindictive Gunhild—no small accomplishment considering
that character’s monolithic grimace. Shaw finds more variation,
subtlety and depth in one-note bitterness than I would have imagined
possible. And Lindsay Duncan completes the triangle with a precise
and penetrating Ella, a role with more emotional range than Gunhild
but dangerous for an actress for that reason. Ella must appear
more poised and balanced at first but then reveal later that her
poise was completely a mask. Duncan understands this task thoroughly,
hiding all hint of her delusory mania until the third act and
then releasing it to stunning effect.
This production, directed by James Macdonald,
is also visually stunning, as set designer Tom Pye has cleverly
solved the play’s formidable challenges. Like When We
Dead Awaken (the play that came after it), Borkman
plays mostly in a bourgeois interior and then opens out into an
epic and violent landscape in its final scenes. This means that
the bourgeois setting must entirely disappear so that the action
can expand beyond the specific and explode the foregoing realism.
Pye’s efficient solution was to place Victorian furniture
pieces amid snow mounds and drifts on a highly polished black
stage, with white flakes on the floor catching the hems of dresses
and the soles of shoes. Then near the end, that furniture is quickly
removed, and powerful snow machines generate a gorgeous blizzard
against a black void. It’s a marvelous, uncomplicated effect
that brings beautiful unity and closure to the play’s complex
of themes and heartbreaking emotions.
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Cymbeline
By William Shakespeare
New Victory Theatre
209 W. 42nd St.
Box office: 646-223-3010
Cymbeline is a ridiculously complicated play. Generations
of very smart commentators have expatiated on its “imbecilic”
(Samuel Johnson), “trashy” (G.B Shaw), and “monstrous”
(Frank Kermode) plot. Kermode went on to speculate that Shakespeare
probably wrote it late in life just to show “he could do
pretty well anything.” I happen to love this particular
monster, though I recognize how hard it is to stage well. A tale
of war, foiled love and troubled succession set in ancient Britain
and Rome, replete with dozens of intricate and absurd digressions,
it can’t be done with a wholly straight face (which only
calls undue attention to its improbability) or wholly tongue-in-cheek
(which only makes people wonder why you’re doing it). The
modest and scrappy Fiasco Theatre Company has come up with an
ingenious solution to this conundrum. Six actors play the thirty-odd
roles, using only a sheet, a trunk and a few boxes for a setting.
Although they have made some textual adjustments and collapsed
a few sequences to accommodate the multiple casting, they basically
do the play, in all its glorious sprawl. Their constant role-shifts
and set transformations create a delightfully whimsical atmosphere,
but they also inhabit the characters precisely and intelligently
enough to allow serious contemplation of the action, which is
often troubling despite its comic profile. This means that whatever
the production may lack in sustained depth it more than makes
up in fidelity to the play’s moral craziness, which is as
significant as its practical craziness in the end. Fiasco’s
madcap staging of Shakespeare’s head-spinning final act,
in which all the far-flung plot strands must be resolved in absurdly
quick succession, will long stick in my mind as a model of purposeful
insanity in the theater. Not everything works as well: I couldn’t
buy the translation of the old mountain-man and soldier Belarius
into a woman (Belaria) capable of fighting the invading Romans,
for instance. The charm and energy of the show are immense, however,
making such small objections seem decidedly unimportant.
