Reviewed by James Karas
*** (out of 5)
If you want to
produce a play by Ibsen, especially a weighty one, you should treat it like an attack on a well-fortified city. You
better have the best generals, bring out your heavy artillery and siege
machinery and aim carefully. John Gabriel Borkman, his 1896 play,
demands nothing else but if you are successful, you will be richly rewarded.
Borkman is a grand play
that deals with complex issues that are as numerous as they are difficult to
unravel. Director Carey Perloff and her stellar cast illuminate most of the
complexity of the play in a superb production at the Tom Patterson Theatre.
From left: Lucy Peacock, Seana McKenna, Scott Wentworth.
Photography by Don Dixon.
The play is
aptly named after its central character. John Gabriel Borkman is a megalomaniac
banker who committed moral and legal crimes on a grand scale. His greed had no
bounds as he attempted to amass a great fortune while destroying the lives of
people (it’s only money) including the lives of his friends and the woman who
was in love with him. As with many such persons, he claimed to have a vision, a
plan to do good for people. The vision was probably delusional or self-serving.
The result was that he was convicted and incarcerated for five years. The play
begins eight years after his release from prison.
Scott Wentworth
as Borkman is completely egocentric and remorseless. He lives in the grand hall
of his house alone and paces up and down most of the time. Vilhalm is his only
friend (superbly played by Joseph Ziegler) and his daughter Frida (Natalie
Francis) who visits and plays the violin for him. Borkman discards Vilhalm, a
man of decency, forgiveness and understanding, who is unlike the delusional
dreamer who hallucinates of making a comeback.
Lucy Peacock plays
Borkman’s embittered wife who is full of hatred but just as delusional as her
husband. She dreams of her son Erhart (Antoine Yared), in mythical heroic fashion,
restoring her reputation. Her twin sister Ella (Seana McKenna) raised Erhart after
the Borkmans lost everything (they are living in her house) but she too hates John
Gabriel because he destroyed her ability to love.
Peacock and
McKenna have distinctive voices which can deliver tinges of bitterness, hatred
and passion with individual intonation but at the same time sound like twin
sisters which is what they are in the play. They fight for the soul of Erhart,
the one because she needs a liberator and a restorer of her reputation, the
other as the young man who will take her name and inherit her fortune. Peacock
and McKenna are magnificent.
From left: Scott Wentworth
as John Gabriel Borkman, Seana McKenna as Miss Ella Rentheim and Lucy Peacock
as Mrs. Gunhild Borkman inJohn Gabriel Borkman. Photography by David Hou.
Erhart is
a nice young man who is in love with Mrs Wilton (Sarah Afful) who happens to be
seven years older than him and a widow. He asserts his independence by breaking
away from his mother and aunt (really his stepmother) and their ambitions for
him.
For the final act
Ibsen takes the two sisters and Borkman out in the stormy weather where they
must account for themselves in a heavily symbolic scene.
The
theatre-in-the-round Tom Patterson restricts design to stage furniture and lighting.
Designer Christina Poddubiuk decorates the stage with a few pieces of furniture
and with judicious lighting design by Bonnie Beecher, we do get the
claustrophobic and closed world of the play.
Director Perloff
takes a heavy-handed approach to this dark play that demands that type of
treatment. The last scene in the snow smacks of melodrama but this is a
production that Ibsen would have certainly approved of.
______
John
Gabriel Borkman by Henrik
Ibsen in a translation by Paul Walsh continues in repertory until September 23,
2016 at the Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca
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