★★★✰✰
The stage brightens to reveal a woman, blanketed and couch-bound, gazing forlornly into her television set. Were it not for the disturbance that sets the ensuing drama in motion, one imagines she’d remain there forever. She is Gunhild Borkman (Clare Higgins), the wife of the disgraced banker John Gabriel Borkman (Simon Russell Beale) and, effectively, his cellmate too. Both are wilting under house arrest in the wake of curiously unspecified financial crimes.
In this revival of Henrik Ibsen’s penultimate play John Gabriel Borkman, the bleakest thing about the downfall of the rich and powerful is its crushing banality. Naturally, it is also by far the funniest thing. For the Borkmans, defeat is to lay in bed all day, petulantly retreating under the covers. Exile is comprised not of decadent excesses, but of being driven slowly to madness through sheer, constant proximity to one another. Mrs Borkman’s days are soundtracked by the restless footsteps of her husband in the upper loft he refuses to leave; every footstep deepening her contempt. Still, the two face stiff competition in the unhappiness stakes due to the arrival of Ella (Lia Williams), estranged sister to Gunhild and estranged former lover to John Gabriel. Ella, for her part, is dying, resolving to make a final push to settle scores and claim full custody of her nephew Erhart (Sebastian De Souza).
This is the stuff of juicy drama but, where Lucinda Coxon and director Nicholas Hytner’s new version of Borkman (playing at the Bridge Theatre until late November) truly excels is in unearthing the deadpan, claustrophobic absurdity of it all. As played by Beale, the titular bad banker is a caged animal, seething and snarling in confinement. He is also a creature of self-pity, and a snob of the highest order. Borkman’s sole remaining friend (Michael Simkins) asks little in exchange for his visits, save for the assurance that his writing is any good at all. It is a price the banker finds much too strenuous to keep paying. Furthermore, he decries the lifelong absence of anyone to understand him or his genius, not counting his co-conspirator and soulmate Ella on the grounds that she is a woman. Most foolhardy of all is the feverish tug of war over young Erhart, a boy the Borkmans speak of as if he were five years old when he is in fact 23, and thoroughly disinterested in the lot of them.
In every irony and small fit of pettiness, is a clear understanding of the weakness barely concealed by power. Still, the very quality that allows this John Gabriel Borkman to excel as savage comedy ultimately undermines its resonance as tragedy. It’s easy enough to laugh at the expense of Borkman’s unglamorous exile, his self-absorption, his casual misogyny. It’s near impossible to muster any real feeling for his plight. Of the central players, Williams’ frailty and quavering rage as Ella come closest to sympathy but, even she is quick to dismiss the hardships of those Borkman has betrayed as merely financial, piffling next to the extent of her heartbreak. As the last act fully embraces melodrama, the tragic grandeur to which it aspires feels oddly ill-fitting. The play closes with a mournful lament, but it feels as if it’s merely a substitution for the mordant punchline that ought to be in its place.
Words by Thomas Messner
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