A graceful coup: Rosmersholm at Duke of York’s
Rosmersholm
Sonia Friedman Productions
Duke of York’s Theatre
Stalls S12, £15
23 May 2019
Rosmersholm website
It doesn’t always work for a production to be very literal; but I’ve been wondering if maybe it does always work for Ibsen – domestic Ibsen, I mean. In Ian Rickson’s production of Rosmersholm, when the play calls for a grand drawing room with a window looking out to something the audience can’t quite see, that’s what it gets; when the finale calls for a macabre and total disaster, that too is provided, with a grace that understates its theatrical coup. This is the production’s only intervention, and it’s one that is explicit in the text. The result is an extremely entertaining evening with Ibsen.
I hesitate as I write because I don’t want to say it’s Ibsen without distractions, because departure from the text is sometimes anything but a distraction. Nor would I want to suggest that sticking faithfully to the text is a surefire recipe for success, because often it isn’t. It is credit, really, that must go to Rickson and his team both on stage and backstage, for a dexterity such that their interpretation feels it grows directly from the text itself as a continuous extension. It’s a feat.
That said, the continuity extends most to set and stage design; it’s harder for actors to pretend as convincingly as props do that they originate from a different age. The whiff of modernity particularly around the romantic leads, Hayley Atwell and Tom Burke, doesn’t diminish their impact but instead lends an interesting texture that I wonder might not have been there in decades past, and perhaps may now never be escaped. Atwell in particular is excellent, and they and the rest of the cast craft distinct, consistent, knowable characters – but even as I went with them into the depths of third-act gloom, I kept also thinking, ‘Well, they’re overreacting a bit, aren’t they?’
The only impact that distance has is that rather than be lost in tears I instead marvelled at the fluidity of the final theatrical gesture, admiring it as the jewel in the crown of a tasteful, sensitive, well-produced, well-acted production. Maybe it wouldn’t suit Emperor and Galilean or Peer Gynt – but it’s a very respectable Rosmersholm.
No comments yet.