In case you were wondering, no, the Stratford Festival has not hopped onto the zombie apocalypse bandwagon with any of its shows this year. Nor are they staging Dracula.
But there are more ways to be dead and yet alive than just those two. All around you, every day, are people who go through the motions but have long since ceased to live in any truly meaningful sense of the term.
And that is one of the key themes of my last Stratford show of the season (so far), Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman.
I would be the last one to dispute that the plays of Ibsen, like those of Chekhov, are very much an acquired taste. Even among those who admire and perform Ibsen's work, John Gabriel Borkman is not nearly as well known as, say, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, or A Doll's House. It's the author's penultimate work, and in it the dramatic realism of earlier plays is pared away in favour of a conflict which is almost entirely internal.
The play also makes use of elliptical, almost telegraphic language as the characters argue over their situation. Only gradually, towards the end of the play, does the full story of that situation become plain to the audience -- a technique more often encountered in murder mysteries.
Why, then, do I speak of people being dead and yet alive in this play? I suppose, as much as any aspect, it's because three of the quartet of principal characters are marking time on an endless treadmill where nothing ever changes and nothing is ever accomplished. As well, one of them is dying of an unnamed disease while another is told that he is dead, and lying on the ground.
There are four members of the same family circle in Borkman, and their intertwined destinies form the subject matter of the play. Of the four, only the young man, Erhart Borkman, has a life waiting for him to live it. His father, John Gabriel Borkman, has returned home after serving a lengthy prison sentence for embezzlement from the bank of which he was the director. Because of his criminal record, he has no future. Borkman's wife, Gunhild (Rentheim) Borkman, provided the funds which fueled Borkman's rise in life to his present position -- and she has refused to see him or speak to him since his return. Gunhild's twin sister, Ella, loved Borkman when they were young and he claimed to love her, but abandoned her for Gunhild when it became apparent that Gunhild would inherit their father's wealth -- and Ella as a consequence has never married. These three older characters are all trapped in a circle of love-hate relationships with each other, and each of them becomes enmeshed in the battle for the love -- for the soul -- of Erhart. Each, seems to feel that triumph in this struggle would be a vindication of self as well as a final kiss-off to the other two.
I first saw this play performed almost 40 years ago, at the Shaw Festival in 1978, and was amazed that such unlikely and unlikable people could hold such a powerful and continuing grip on my imagination. Unlike some plays which depend on one or two key characters, each of the four people I've described has to be depicted by a strong actor with considerable skill and subtlety if the whole play isn't to simply lie down and die on the stage. I'm sorry I can't remember the names of any of the actors in the Shaw production, but they must have been a powerhouse cast indeed to have such a huge impact on me.
Stratford's production uses a new translation by Paul Walsh, commissioned by the Festival, and developed with the assistance of (among others) all three of the principal actors. It is being presented on the long, narrow arena stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre -- always a calculated risk with a play written for performance in a standard proscenium theatre. With a near-ideal cast and very skilled direction from Carey Perloff, the play succeeds magnificently.
Christina Poddubiuk's set consists of heavy furniture and huge piles of paper documents. It evokes a world of social obligations conflicting with the driven will to succeed. Her costumes delineate the lives of the characters. A stern Victorian dress in dull grey-black for Gunhild contrasts nicely with a more glistening black finish on Ella's dress. Borkman wears a long, below-the-knee black overcoat which clearly telegraphs the cold upstairs Great Hall in which he has lived for the eight years since his release from prison. Erhart appears in a dapper, fashionable black suit with a top hat, a clear signal that he intends to live in the world. Notice the preponderance of black -- the colour of death.
Mrs. Wilton, the fashionable lady of doubtful social propriety who finally provides Erhart with his escape route, wears a shorter, fancier, leg-displaying dress in a reddish-brown tone -- the design even more than the colour signifying her equivocal position in the community.
The play takes place in a single evening and night in winter, and the wintry coldness of outside mirrors the winter in the hearts of the characters. That chill is evoked by a narrow, continuous line of cold, white-blue strip lighting running around the entire perimeter of the stage floor.
Now, to the performers. I was intrigued to realize that the casting of the two principal women exactly reversed the casting of the same two performers three seasons ago in Schiller's Mary Stuart. Once again we have a raging, uncertain, ice queen facing off against a woman who, although wounded by life, is still capable of compassion. Seana McKenna, who played Elizabeth in Mary Stuart, now appears as Ella, while Lucy Peacock (who depicted Mary, Queen of Scots) now takes the stage as the cold, angry Gunhild. It leads me on to speculate how either of those plays might have appeared if the casting of those roles within each one were to be reversed!
To take the cast from the short roles up to the leads, begin with Deidre Gillard-Rowlings as Gunhild's maid. Servant roles are notoriously underdeveloped as characters, but Gillard-Rowlings made a strong impact with her characteristic assumption of fear. Every time she had to enter the room, she looked and sounded frightened, and in the last act this fear rose to outright terror when she found herself face to face with John Gabriel Borkman himself -- whom, it is to be surmised, she has not seen for over a decade even though he has been living in the house.
In her brief appearance, Natalie Francis effectively created the youth and naivete of Frida, the young girl who wishes to become a musician.
The simple-minded clerk, Vilhelm Foldal (Frida's father), was played to such great effect by Joseph Ziegler that he totally vanished into the character. This is not as easy as it sounds, and is a skill shared by only the strongest of actors. It's obvious that Vilhelm provides what little comic relief there is in the play, but I always find it uncomfortable laughing at him -- and I feel sure that this was Ibsen's intention.
Antoine Yared projects the youthful energy and determination of Erhart, combining it with an unspoken desire for his mother, father, and aunt to support his wish to go out and live his own life. But only Ella does so in the end, and his reluctance to leave her alone is also clearly projected.
Sarah Afful's Fanny Wilton can only be described as sensual. Ibsen's text, elliptical though it is at this point, makes it clear that her relationship with Erhart is primarily sexual, and her sensuality of appearance, walk and voice is a necessary counterweight to all the cold, hard, loveless energy in the Borkman home.
And this brings us to the big three: McKenna as Ella, Peacock as Gunhild, and Scott Wentworth as Borkman. At this point, words nearly fail me. It's hard to imagine any way that any of these three powerful actors could improve on either the depiction of their characters, or the interplay among the three of them. This was theatrical teamwork of the highest order.
Each one, too, had amazing individual moments. For Lucy Peacock it was the moment when she identified the remorseless footsteps over her head as those of "the Bank Director -- yes, him." Her tone made it clear as day that she could not, would not utter her husband's name.
For Seana McKenna as Ella Rentheim it was the moment she first announced that she was dying of her chronic illness. Cancer? We aren't told, and it really doesn't matter to the play. What does matter is how clearly she played the duality of a woman who says that love has been killed in her yet still plainly feels love towards her nephew.
Scott Wentworth as Borkman had one telling moment in the second scene in which he ducked away from Ella's questions about why he didn't use her wealth along with that of all the other investors in the bank. And in the final scene, his ascent of the piled-up furniture mirrored his monumental speech about his determination to start over and ascend finally to the heights he was denied before.
I find it hard to imagine any cast of actors who could create a stronger team in these three strange, barbed, unfulfilled characters.
There were a couple of staging issues that I felt hampered the play slightly. Having Gunhild fly into a rage is a perfectly natural outcome of the script. Having her express her rage by shoving wheeled furniture around the stage at top speed made no sense to me at all. It was so far outside her character, where shoving the papers off the desk was not (and she did that too).
The penultimate scene is the three-way war among Gunhild, Ella, and John Gabriel Borkman over the future of Erhart. It's a powerful scene, not least because of the watching figure of Fanny Wilton, already quite aware that she has won and the other three have all lost. But it's also the weakest scene in the script, a scene in which the same arguments and ideas are repeated over and over. Here, I felt that the careful orchestration which director Carey Perloff and her company brought to other parts of the show deserted them. The scene needs to build in intensity, not just in volume. As staged, it didn't really grow at all, just played through at one level -- a high-powered level, but definitely not varying at all as it progressed. All the actors need to keep raising the stakes as each round of the debate rolls along.
That weakness, though, was redeemed in the final scene on the mountainside, a scene which can easily become pointless and boring. As performed here, and especially with the intensity of those final speeches from Scott Wentworth's Borkman, this indeed became the climactic moment of the show.
There's a tendency with Ibsen to want to slow down, take big beats, and spread the material out over a long time span. This production avoided the temptation, making all the more telling the few great pauses that did occur. The final moment of reconciliation offered and accepted stretched the pause of reluctance and final acquiescence to the limit, and scored a powerful final tableau to end the play.
It's unlikely that John Gabriel Borkman will ever be a popular play, but it is unquestionably a powerful and challenging one -- a play whose performance should be dared only by the best of the best among actors and directors. In spite of a couple of weaknesses I've noted, Stratford's production certainly didn't disappoint in that respect.
Christina Poddubiuk's set consists of heavy furniture and huge piles of paper documents. It evokes a world of social obligations conflicting with the driven will to succeed. Her costumes delineate the lives of the characters. A stern Victorian dress in dull grey-black for Gunhild contrasts nicely with a more glistening black finish on Ella's dress. Borkman wears a long, below-the-knee black overcoat which clearly telegraphs the cold upstairs Great Hall in which he has lived for the eight years since his release from prison. Erhart appears in a dapper, fashionable black suit with a top hat, a clear signal that he intends to live in the world. Notice the preponderance of black -- the colour of death.
Mrs. Wilton, the fashionable lady of doubtful social propriety who finally provides Erhart with his escape route, wears a shorter, fancier, leg-displaying dress in a reddish-brown tone -- the design even more than the colour signifying her equivocal position in the community.
The play takes place in a single evening and night in winter, and the wintry coldness of outside mirrors the winter in the hearts of the characters. That chill is evoked by a narrow, continuous line of cold, white-blue strip lighting running around the entire perimeter of the stage floor.
Now, to the performers. I was intrigued to realize that the casting of the two principal women exactly reversed the casting of the same two performers three seasons ago in Schiller's Mary Stuart. Once again we have a raging, uncertain, ice queen facing off against a woman who, although wounded by life, is still capable of compassion. Seana McKenna, who played Elizabeth in Mary Stuart, now appears as Ella, while Lucy Peacock (who depicted Mary, Queen of Scots) now takes the stage as the cold, angry Gunhild. It leads me on to speculate how either of those plays might have appeared if the casting of those roles within each one were to be reversed!
To take the cast from the short roles up to the leads, begin with Deidre Gillard-Rowlings as Gunhild's maid. Servant roles are notoriously underdeveloped as characters, but Gillard-Rowlings made a strong impact with her characteristic assumption of fear. Every time she had to enter the room, she looked and sounded frightened, and in the last act this fear rose to outright terror when she found herself face to face with John Gabriel Borkman himself -- whom, it is to be surmised, she has not seen for over a decade even though he has been living in the house.
In her brief appearance, Natalie Francis effectively created the youth and naivete of Frida, the young girl who wishes to become a musician.
The simple-minded clerk, Vilhelm Foldal (Frida's father), was played to such great effect by Joseph Ziegler that he totally vanished into the character. This is not as easy as it sounds, and is a skill shared by only the strongest of actors. It's obvious that Vilhelm provides what little comic relief there is in the play, but I always find it uncomfortable laughing at him -- and I feel sure that this was Ibsen's intention.
Antoine Yared projects the youthful energy and determination of Erhart, combining it with an unspoken desire for his mother, father, and aunt to support his wish to go out and live his own life. But only Ella does so in the end, and his reluctance to leave her alone is also clearly projected.
Sarah Afful's Fanny Wilton can only be described as sensual. Ibsen's text, elliptical though it is at this point, makes it clear that her relationship with Erhart is primarily sexual, and her sensuality of appearance, walk and voice is a necessary counterweight to all the cold, hard, loveless energy in the Borkman home.
And this brings us to the big three: McKenna as Ella, Peacock as Gunhild, and Scott Wentworth as Borkman. At this point, words nearly fail me. It's hard to imagine any way that any of these three powerful actors could improve on either the depiction of their characters, or the interplay among the three of them. This was theatrical teamwork of the highest order.
Each one, too, had amazing individual moments. For Lucy Peacock it was the moment when she identified the remorseless footsteps over her head as those of "the Bank Director -- yes, him." Her tone made it clear as day that she could not, would not utter her husband's name.
For Seana McKenna as Ella Rentheim it was the moment she first announced that she was dying of her chronic illness. Cancer? We aren't told, and it really doesn't matter to the play. What does matter is how clearly she played the duality of a woman who says that love has been killed in her yet still plainly feels love towards her nephew.
Scott Wentworth as Borkman had one telling moment in the second scene in which he ducked away from Ella's questions about why he didn't use her wealth along with that of all the other investors in the bank. And in the final scene, his ascent of the piled-up furniture mirrored his monumental speech about his determination to start over and ascend finally to the heights he was denied before.
I find it hard to imagine any cast of actors who could create a stronger team in these three strange, barbed, unfulfilled characters.
There were a couple of staging issues that I felt hampered the play slightly. Having Gunhild fly into a rage is a perfectly natural outcome of the script. Having her express her rage by shoving wheeled furniture around the stage at top speed made no sense to me at all. It was so far outside her character, where shoving the papers off the desk was not (and she did that too).
The penultimate scene is the three-way war among Gunhild, Ella, and John Gabriel Borkman over the future of Erhart. It's a powerful scene, not least because of the watching figure of Fanny Wilton, already quite aware that she has won and the other three have all lost. But it's also the weakest scene in the script, a scene in which the same arguments and ideas are repeated over and over. Here, I felt that the careful orchestration which director Carey Perloff and her company brought to other parts of the show deserted them. The scene needs to build in intensity, not just in volume. As staged, it didn't really grow at all, just played through at one level -- a high-powered level, but definitely not varying at all as it progressed. All the actors need to keep raising the stakes as each round of the debate rolls along.
That weakness, though, was redeemed in the final scene on the mountainside, a scene which can easily become pointless and boring. As performed here, and especially with the intensity of those final speeches from Scott Wentworth's Borkman, this indeed became the climactic moment of the show.
There's a tendency with Ibsen to want to slow down, take big beats, and spread the material out over a long time span. This production avoided the temptation, making all the more telling the few great pauses that did occur. The final moment of reconciliation offered and accepted stretched the pause of reluctance and final acquiescence to the limit, and scored a powerful final tableau to end the play.
It's unlikely that John Gabriel Borkman will ever be a popular play, but it is unquestionably a powerful and challenging one -- a play whose performance should be dared only by the best of the best among actors and directors. In spite of a couple of weaknesses I've noted, Stratford's production certainly didn't disappoint in that respect.
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