Ibsen still grips with grief
Almeida
CHILDREN HAVE been dying with wearying regularity at the Almeida. The theatre’s barnstorming Oresteia had that terrifyingly convincing scene in which Agamemnon’s daughter is put to death with the clinical efficiency of the Dignitas clinic. That was followed by the infanticide of Medea (also revived at the Gate theatre and recently at the National, too) and now we have the death of Little Eyolf, the boy crippled as a result of parental negligence.
Ibsen is here interested in grief more than guilt. And as is always the case with the Norwegian master, what is so striking (other than the complexity of his female characters) is the sheer speed and daring of his plotting. Here, in Richard Eyre’s faultless production, events and emotions unfold against a majestic backdrop of fjords.
In the foreground there is a writer father whose disabled son becomes his life’s work, and a mother who resents with such vehemence her husband’s disinterest in her, she might wish that her son were never born. Or was dead.
Just when you think you know what this play is, it changes. The effect of Eyolf’s loss on Rita and Alfred Allmers’s marriage is like watching the death and resurrection of a relationship, with many states in between.
Lydia Leonard and Jolyon Coy are superb as the possessive wife and devoted dad. And Ibsen paints a gripping portrait of marriage that is destroyed by loss and irreconcilable differences, while somehow allowing us and them some hope for the future.
Lyttelton
IDON’T KNOW if or when I’ll ever be able to forgive Caryl Churchill for her 2009 play Seven Jewish Children. And not only because she wrote a work — triggered by Israel’s bombing of Gaza — that I felt was antisemitic, but because it still, to this day, evokes in me a bitter resentment that such a rare talent should be used so unjustly, even if, as Churchill’s supporters might say, the greater injustice is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
There are, it should remembered those, some of them Jews, who are apparently relaxed about the play and profoundly disagree with this view, among them Dominic Cooke who directed the original production of Seven Jewish Children. I envy their equanimity. Yet, perhaps, works as audacious as this 45-minute piece, also directed by Cooke and which in an interesting way feels much longer at times, might help to move things on.
It is set after, before and even during a death. The opening scene sees nine mourners at a funeral exchanging fond and admiring memories of the deceased. The sense of life goes on, that is most vivid at a funeral, is subverted with each mourner making an aside to the audience, revealing how much longer he or she has to live and how they are to die.
The middle, afterlife scene, is a monologue by the man they are mourning. He’s a largely blameless soul, terrifically played by Patrick Godfrey, who waits for a kind of judgment to befall him, even though he believes no such judgment exists. And then comes the final act, which is performed in silence.
It would undermine the play to reveal here how pre-death decline is evoked. You need an element of surprise. But it’s done riskily and magnificently. The effect is like watching a piece that is part play and part art installation. And even those in the audience who were checking their watches and closed their eyes for a quick nap would have to admit that a play rarely evokes the human condition more memorably.