It’s an eccentric play, and undeniably less ‘important’ feeling than Ibsen’s prodigious greatest hits.
Erkhart (Sebastian de Souza) and his new love Fanny (Ony Uhiara) make a couple of fleeting appearances, and their vivacity and willingness to live for the now is a painful contrast to Borkman and his former lovers ‘shadows’, as Ella describes them. It’s not Ibsen at his most incendiary – a la ‘Ghosts’ or ‘A Doll’s House’ or ‘An Enemy of the People’ – but it feels like it could be a coda to one of those plays, a weird, funny, bleak, cathartic portrait of a group of once huge personalities now ebbing away. But a combination of his uncrushed self-belief, a certain innate decency, and his weirdly charming relationship with his last loyal friend Willhelm (Michael Simkins) serves to give things a blackly humorous piquancy that livens up the play no end. It’s all very bleak, but Lucinda Coxon’s adaptation palpably and surprisingly lightens up when we move upstairs to meet Simon Russell Beale’s Borkman. ‘The banker’ is how Gunhild refers to him, with venomous disdain. Eventually it becomes apparent that the clanking noise that has disconcertingly reverberated in the background ever since the start is Borkman himself, pacing the upper floor where he lives a separate, ghostly life. There is bitterness between them, particular over possession of Gunhild and Borkman’s son Erhart, who Ella raised as her own after Borkman was jailed. Williams’s Ella is ethereal and wild, Higgin’s Gunhild earthbound and grumpy. She is aghast when there’s a knock at the door and her estranged sister turns up: Ella. The ground floor is inhabited by Gunhild (Clare Higgins), Borkman’s wife. The production is set in his elegant but extremely un-cosy brutalist house – a great set from Anna Fleischle – which was saved from the debtors after his ex-lover Ella (Lia Williams) stepped in and purchased it.
But he’s nowhere in sight, barely spoken of. Although there’s some pretty fruity early stuff featuring dancing elves and whatnot, dour Norwegian stage legend Henrik Ibsen is that rare beast: a playwright so good that even his obscure plays are mostly bangers.įinally revived by Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge after years of pandemic-related delays, the relatively little-seen ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ feels less like an Ibsen tragedy, more an epilogue to one of them.Įponymous Norwegian businessman Borkman is a former high flyer, whose messianic belief in his ability to steer the country down the right path led to him committing a massive act of fraud that he was jailed for.Īs the play begins, Borkman has served his sentence.
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