Genius brightens the Nordic gloom
WarNiNG: this 19thcentury Nordic noir contains some scenes with very strong pessimism from the beginning and throughout. Notes in the programme suggest that this gloom might have been wrought by the Norwegian weather, but i think the writer, Henrik ibsen, wanted us to feel the full force of his wrath at the hypocrisy of Norway’s victorian bourgeoisie.
Fear not. The play also has Penny Downie in the leading role, bringing light and warmth to mike Poulton’s vigorously bleak new english version of the story. she is the wealthy mother of a young man who’s returned from a dissolute gap year with a terminal case of congenital syphilis.
she is, however, determined to resolve the mess left by her late husband: a Harvey Weinstein-style alpha male of his day, prone to forcing himself on the staff.
The play is in need of updating with all its agonising over sin, conscience and the religious imperatives of marriage. accordingly, Poulton’s muscular rendition of ibsen’s dialogue cuts through its euphemistic period meanderings.
The ending of the play is still perhaps irredeemably melodramatic as the son is finally pulled under by the disease he’s inherited from his father. But Downie’s imperious, yet tender, performance keeps the action from lapsing into black comedy.
she is the monarch of her home and i couldn’t take my eyes off her. Tall, powerful and emphatic, Downie delivers a performance
that is fluted with delicious notes of sarcasm. But most of all there is a sense of iron determination to redeem the family’s history.
at times pensive and uncertain, she is also decisive — even intoxicated, as though gasping on laughing gas as she lays bare the family secrets.
No one is more alarmed by this than James Wilby, who plays the pious family friend Pastor manders. With his floppy hair and tendency to sway on his feet, Wilby makes his pompous moral rectitude seem almost likeable.
Pierro Niel-mee, meanwhile, is suitably peculiar and earnestly intense as the visionary artist son possessed by a sense of manifest destiny that declines into twitchy, alcohol-fuelled mania.
There is some light relief from Declan Conlon, whose mildly lecherous local carpenter is rendered here as a louche West of ireland vagabond.
But that’s as frivolous as it gets. lucy Bailey’s production is never less than resolute in its gloom, with mike Britton’s design inspired by that other great Norwegian master of angst, edvard munch (he of The scream).
For the last act, the set creaks, shudders and opens up under a sulphurous light while ash falls slowly from above, as if the Gates of Hell themselves were opening.
it is in some ways a little over the top, but as they say in Norway ‘in for a penny, in for a Krone’.