Pale imitation of Bergman’s classic
Fanny and Alexander Old Vic
Aboy in a sailor-suit stands alone on stage and mischievously informs us, “Ladies and Gentlemen you are about to witness the longest play in the history of the world!” You’re torn between going “Ha-ha”, “Help!” and, “Hang on a minute, sonny’ – after all theatreland is saturated with extra-long plays. Seeing, though, as how this is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny
and Alexander – the 1982 Swedish TV miniseries so good it became a cinematic marathon in its own right, there’s the lurking possibility that the jest may be in earnest.
Actually, Stephen Beresford’s version – directed by Max Webster – goes out of its way to avoid turning into a sedentary, sciatica-inducing nightmare. It runs to more than three hours – but there are two short intervals, and it’s determined to be brisk, fluid, never-boring. Yet that’s the problem, in a way.
On paper, it makes perfect sense to put the story of the Ekdahl family on stage: not only did Bergman, who died in 2007, regard himself with pride as a theatre artist, but the Ekdahls – inspired by his own family and upbringing – are early-20th-century thespian types: Oscar, the father of the boy (Alexander), runs and stars in a provincial playhouse, along with the lad (and his sister Fanny’s) mother, Emilie, while their grandmother Helena is a doyenne of this world too. Tom Pye’s set design offers, in the early part of the evening, gorgeous red-velvet curtains and when you watch the screen version you note how much the Ekdahls’ living-quarters have the magic of the proscenium-arch about them.
Yet what you get in the Bergman original, it almost goes without saying, is an intense quality of lingering observation, particularly of its young subjects, that lends the entire enterprise a quality of mystery and wonder. To compare the beauty of the original with the visuals here is like comparing a rainbow with an iridescent soap-bubble. There’s no emotional equivalence, say, between the faltering Christmas speech that Sargon Yelda’s Oscar – soon to be felled by a stroke, setting in train his widow’s disastrous re-marriage – offers in tribute to the safe sanctuary that theatre provides and the close-up melancholy in the film.
I hate to be so grudging about a project that utilises a large ensemble, harnesses considerable resources and features a clutch of fine performances. Among theses are Penelope Wilton as the wistful matriarch Helena, Catherine Walker as Oscar’s sorely abused widowed wife and Kevin Doyle, too, as her religious-minded second husband. That the source material is rich and astonishing, you’re left in little doubt. Why it cries out for a stage version isn’t fully answered.
Until April 14. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com