John Gabriel Borkman
The Times 7th
March 2003
Darkness in a
white landscape, Benedict
Nightingale
Edvard Munch, who knew something about both
landscapes and emotional power, called Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman “the most
powerful winter landscape in Scandinavian art”, and there are times in Stephen
Unwin’s revival for English Touring Theatre when you see what he meant.
Michael Pennington’s playing of the title character
helps. So does Neil Warmington’s set. Behind a scrim, snow falls incessantly on
sad little firs and a withered birch. In front is a living room that mutates
into an attic but always suggests that some 19th-century Ikea has
launched a range of spare, Shaker-style furniture. And the evening ends with a
tableau of death, complete with black figures, more snow and the Munch-like
feel.
For most of the evening Pennington’s Borkman, the
entrepreneur jailed for embezzlement, broods and paces upstairs. His wife,
Gillian Barge’s Gunhild, broods and sits downstairs, looking and sounding like
some grim Norse goddess. Enter her twin sister, Linda Bassett’s Ella, who has
rather more reason to brood, since she’s dying of a disease ultimately caused
by the stress of being rejected years ago by Borkman; but, at least at first,
she exudes a quiet melancholy.
The plot mainly involves James Loye’s Erhart, who
is Gunhild’s son but was brought up by Ella, which is why these wrangling
sisters want to possess him: Ella for death-bed solace, Gunhild so that he can
restore the family honour. But those who know their Ibsen will see the women’s
error. People, especially young people own themselves. Self-fulfilment matters
more than convention, duty, self-suffocation.
Familiar Ibsen themes are packed into this dense, striking even if sometimes melodramatic play. It’s about the claims of truth and illusion, but even more about the crimes of the heart and the impossibility of escaping the wrongs of the past. In every case that implicates Borkman, who dreams only of rebuilding a career that combined crassness with utopianism. As the title suggests, he’s John, the blunt man of business, but also Gabriel, angelic visionary eager to create industrial miracles for humankind.
Memories of Vanessa Redgrave, who played Ella seven
years ago, aren’t wholly kind to Bassett, who gets the surface rage but not the
deep pain of love denied. Barge, whose main job is to be bitter and baleful,
has the force of personality to get away with such lines as “you have destroyed
the last remnants of what little I had to live for”. But the evening belongs
primarily to a sleek, silver-haired Pennington.
All right, he doesn’t catch as much of the angel as
Richardson in 1975 or Scofield in 1996, but his Borkman is spot on when he
compares himself to the shattered Napoleon. He’s tough, bold, sharp of wit and
tongue, self-obsesses, charismatic. John in excelsis.
The Times, 9th
March 2003, Kate Bassett
The British Theatre seems obsessed with
Scandinavian classics this season. You’d think 2003 was Ibsen’s centenary with
the RSC rehearsing Brand, the Almeida ser to reopen with the Lady
From the Sea and Ingmar Bergman’s Ghosts coming to the Barbican in
May. Meantime, I caught English Touring Theatre’s John Gabriel Borkman in
Greenwich. This is another portrait of an old man in a marital “cold war”, dreaming
of starting again even as he stares death in the face.
Silver-bearded yet vigorous, Michael Pennington
plays the disgraced businessman who’s long been stuck neurotically pacing in
his study, while his estranged wife, Gillian Barge’s Gunhild, sits frostily
downstairs. She’s determined her son Erhart will be her loyal golden boy, but
she has competition from Linda Bassett’s Ella – Erhart’s foster mother and
JGB’s first love who now owns the house.
Stephen Unwin’s production has a spare, yet pretty simplicity.
The pine floor of Neil Warmington’s set, furnished with a few chairs, runs into
the outdoors where snow falls on a silver birch. That starkness sometimes seems
to match the bare bones of Ibsen’s scenario. Some moments do, however, seem
flatly under-directed while other wax melodramatic, and Stephen Mulrine’s
translation can sound stiff. Still Bassett (no relation), is a fine subtle
actress, playing steely with tenderness underneath. Ibsen’s condemnation of
selfishness and his simultaneous celebration of self-determination do come over
clearly. And Pennington is memorably passionate, staggering up a mountain to
die, still fantasising about the factories and ships he could have owned as the
king of all he surveys.