Source: ForeignAffairs4
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance Creative Writing and Practice-based Research, Royal Holloway University of London
Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century play about a woman caught between a stormy past and respectable present has been reimagined for the 21st century in a new production at the Bridge Theatre, London.
This new adaptation arrives bristling with contemporary relevance. Writer and director Simon Stone has included references to Beyoncé and Just Stop Oil activism. It also features a millennial protagonist wrestling with climate anxiety.
Ellida is married to Edward, a doctor, who has two daughters, Asa and Hilda, from a first marriage that ended in their mother’s suicide. But Ellida has secrets, and they’re starting to come out. The first is a history of teenage climate activism. The second is an older man, Finn (Brendan Cowell), someone who was both guru and predator to her in her youth. When he returns, Ellida has a decision to make.
Simon Stone has a distinctive method when working on classics, transplanting the action to different places and times, and working with the actors to find contemporary equivalents to the original language, characters and story.
This play has been transplanted from Norway to England and from the 19th century to the 21st. This works well (even if the Yorkshire coast is hardly the Norwegian fjords). The family is, if anything, wealthier than in Ibsen’s original, though this gives them all a fragile sense of entitlement that makes the family’s disruption all the more potent.
Read more:
What’s next for Afghanistan? Two experts make predictions
The production is set in the round, with the stage in the middle of the audience. This choice places the vivid action under intense scrutiny, but it raises a problem: where is the sea?
The sea is an insistent presence in the play, a source of danger and seduction, luring Ellida back from her settled life. Lizzie Clachan’s design offers some elegant solutions – particularly the interval transformation from white to black, suggesting watery depths beneath shiny surfaces – but the format loses a sense of the ocean, when the ocean is nowhere to be seen. This Ellida feels less like a woman haunted by the sea’s mysteries than an advocate of wild swimming.
Alicia Vikander brings a touching vulnerability to Ellida, her awkwardness cutting through this family’s banter. I might have liked to see a less contained performance; we hear about her inner strength without quite seeing it, so we never feel the pull of the sea and the force of her decision.
Andrew Lincoln is a fine Edward – charming, intelligent, confident bordering on complacent, dangerously slow to recognise the disintegration of his world. The triangle of Ellida, Edward, and Finn feels genuinely dangerous, capable of tilting this world off its axis.
The daughters, exuberantly played by Gracie Oddie-Jones and Isobel Akuwudike, embody a cracklingly funny gen Z self-righteousness and bring a sense of generational change and discontent that broadens the political landscape of the production. The archly knowing dialogue is performed with pleasing, overlapping off-handedness by the ensemble cast.
The production’s relationship with Ibsen is rich and interesting, extending beyond this single play. Ibsen brought back one of the characters from The Lady from the Sea four years later in The Master Builder, an otherwise quite separate play. Stone has clearly sensed Ibsen’s breaking of boundaries between his plays in this decision, which allowed us to glimpse an expanded Ibsen universe.
Running with this shared universe idea, in 2017, Stone created the play Ibsen House for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, a collage of Ibsen narratives in a three-dimensional glass-sided house. He’s at it again here, nicking bits of other plays to enrich this one.
Ellida’s confrontation with Finn (the climate activist with whom she had a sexual relationship aged 15) borrows from a similar confrontation in The Master Builder (1893). In the character of her family friend Heath (Joe Alwyn), Stone combines the terminal illness of Dr Rank from A Doll’s House (1879) with the sculptural ambitions of Rubek from When We Dead Awaken (1900).
But this adaptation shies away from the alien strangeness that makes Ibsen genuinely radical. Ibsen’s plays wrestle uncompromisingly with themselves. Many of his mature plays seem transformed by the forces unleashed by their stories, such that works like A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1891), or John Gabriel Borkman (1897) start as one kind of play and end as quite another.
The Lady from the Sea is the same, beginning as a bucolic family play and ending somewhere mythological and elemental. But Stone’s version, for all its contemporary references, remains a family drama. The last scene, in which everyone explains their feelings at length is the kind of neat and tidy playwriting that Ibsen worked hard to abolish.
There are choices here that echo those made when A Doll’s House first reached Britain in 1884. Then, its title was changed to Breaking a Butterfly and its protagonists, Nora and Torvald Helmer, were domesticated as Flossy and Humphrey Goddard. The original’s radical ending of Nora’s shattering departure was replaced with Humphrey rescuing his wife and burning an incriminating document. He does this while mansplaining that: “Flossy was a child yesterday: today she is a woman.”
Stone’s adaptation isn’t so egregious, but does share a bit of that impulse. The production makes Ibsen relatable, but Ibsen’s plays are always strange, always challenging audiences to confront compelling difference. By translating Ibsen’s environmental and psychological radicalism into familiar contemporary anxieties, Stone is leaving some of the challenge behind.
Perhaps we think we know Ibsen so well and he needs updating. But, as with this year’s Ghosts (Lyric Hammersmith) and My Master Builder (West End), the updating sometimes lightens and tames their dark strangeness. I worry that a generation will only ever see smart versions of Ibsen but will never get a chance to know the originals.
This is a fierce, powerful evening of theatre. But should we not sometimes, like Ellida, meet the challenge of the alien stranger from across the sea?
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
Dan Rebellato does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. The Lady from the Sea: a fierce play that shies from the wonderful unknowability of Henrik Ibsen’s original – https://theconversation.com/the-lady-from-the-sea-a-fierce-play-that-shies-from-the-wonderful-unknowability-of-henrik-ibsens-original-265515