Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Erin Shields, directed by Meg Roe
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 15-September 13, 2015
Ellida about The Stranger: “All that attracts, and tempts, and lures into
the unknown! All the strength of the sea concentrated in this one thing!”
In the past 53 seasons, the Shaw Festival has staged only four different plays by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Shaw’s greatest and most influential 19th-century contemporary. While it has staged Rosmersholm twice (1974 and 2006) and Hedda Gabler twice (1991 and 2012), it surprisingly has never produced such classics as A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884) or The Master Builder (1892). By now one might have expected a festival about Shaw and his contemporaries to have mounted these and moved on to some of Ibsen’s rarer but still important works like Brand (1866), Pillars of Society (1877), Little Eyolf (1894) or When We Dead Awaken (1899). Fortunately, in this, the Festival’s 54th season, the Festival is staging one of Ibsen’s rarer works, The Lady from the Sea (1889). The play proves to be so unusual and exciting, one hopes this marks the beginning of a greater commitment to staging a playwright who influenced Shaw so greatly. After all Shaw wrote a famous essay extolling the playwright in The Quintessence of Ibsenism of 1891.
Ibsen is celebrated as the father of realist drama, but by the time of Rosmersholm (1886) he was already beginning his move into the more symbolic drama that would characterize his last three plays. Rosmersholm involves a man, Johannes Rosmer, who wishes to marry Rebecca, the best friend of his now deceased wife, yet is prevented from doing so because of the guilt he feels for his first wife’s suicide.
Ibsen chose the name Rosmer as a reminder of a Norwegian legend of a merman who lures women to their death in the sea. The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen’s next play after Rosmersholm, is also inspired by Norwegian folklore, in this case the ballad “Agnete og Havmanden” about a merman who lures a married land woman to live with him in the sea. For Lady, Ibsen takes elements of the earlier play’s structure and imagery and develops them in an entirely new way. We have a situation similar to that of Rosmer and Rebecca, except that in Lady, Dr. Wangel (Ric Reid) has already married his second wife Ellida (Jacqueline Thair). Ellida is the lady from the sea of the title who bathes every day in the fjord and finds that she feels suffocated in the mountains where Wangel lives.
Recently Ellida has become increasing agitated by dreams that her first lover, an American sailor, now believed dead, will return to claim her as his wife. Ellida has told Wangel all about him and how he fastened a ring of hers and of his together and threw them into the sea as a form of symbolic marriage (a ritual Ibsen himself experienced). The sailor had to flee but vowed to claim her when he returned. Indeed, the sailor, known only as The Stranger (Mark Uhre), is not dead and does return and demands that Ellida leave Wangel for a life with him. Ellida is thus torn between a natural marriage with The Stranger, a person of the sea just like her, a merman to her mermaid, or a marriage based on social convention with Wangel, a man of the land who admits he is completely different from Ellida. How Ellida will manage to choose and whom she will choose become the engines that drive the play to its gripping conclusion.
Unlike most plays by Ibsen that theatre-goers are familiar with, The Lady from the Sea includes a comic subplot that mirrors the main plot. The plot centres on Bolette (Kristi Frank), Wangel’s elder daughter by his first wife. She is torn between two suitors. On the one hand is Hans Lyngstrand (Kyle Blair), a sickly would-be sculptor who believes a wife’s duty is to be devoted entirely to her husband. On the other hand, is Professor Arnholm, Bolette’s former tutor, an older man who has become enamoured with her and will help her fulfil her desire to leave her small town, see the outside world and study at university. All this he promises to do if she will marry him.
The central issue in Lady as in all of Ibsen’s plays, is freedom. In Rosmersholm, neither Rosmer nor Rebecca felt free since both were too encumbered by guilt. In Lady, Ellida feels bound by her two marriages. The Stranger asks Ellida to choose freely between him and Wangel, but Ellida feels entrapped by both.
Balancing the notion of freedom, Ibsen introduces a new theme in Lady of acclimatization. This is first announced by the comic character Ballested, a foreign actor who has learned to live in Norway by becoming a jack-of-all-trades. Ellida herself links the idea to evolution by noting that all life on land once came from the sea but acclimatized itself to its new surroundings even though it can never banish an inherent longing for the sea. Whether acclimatization represents a form of freedom or bondage is yet another question the play asks.
Designer Camellia Koo strikingly blends the realistic and fantastic imagery of the play in its first striking image. We see Ellida reclining nude on a rock in a pose strongly reminiscent of the statue of The Little Mermaid by Edvard Eriksen from 1913 that gazes out to sea from the harbour of Copenhagen. All through the play Ellida and “her kind” are referred to as “sea-folk” whom Wangel claims are almost a “species apart” from humankind. The song by Jenny Hval and Susanna that begins the play and the eerie music of Alessandro Juliani establish and maintain an air of the supernatural that seems to surround the action.
The day I saw the play (August 4), Jacqueline Thair replaced Moya O’Connell as Ellida. Thair’s performance was so assured and so convincing that had I not read the programme I never would have suspected Thair was an understudy. Thair’s rapid movements, her glances as if an animal caged, gave her the aura of a being not quite habituated to the earthy world of the other characters. Even in her happiest moments Thair conveyed a nameless underlying anxiety. Thair is primarily known for the many musicals she has appeared in, but her performance as Ellida proved that she is capable of revealing depths of character that until now have gone unseen.
As Dr. Wangel, Ric Reid plays that figure uncommon in Ibsen – the understanding husband. Reid shows that Wangel is human enough to be angered and unnerved by the bizarre situation Ellida is in, yet he respects Ellida enough that he listens to his wife and recognizes the truth of her negative assessment of their marriage. Reid never leaves us in doubt about Wangel’s love for Ellida. The question is whether he can prove his love sufficiently to hold onto her.
Mark Uhre is menacing as The Stranger, buy oddly director Meg Roe never lends him an air of mystery as she does Ellida. For two beings who are said to be so alike, this approach does not make sense. This is especially true since The Stranger is almost as much a symbol as a character, an onstage representation of the power of the sea itself. The opening image proves that Roe can use stagecraft to powerful effect when she chooses, but her neglect of The Stranger is a puzzling flaw.
Kyle Blair is excellent as the unwell artist Hans Lyngstrand. Lyngstrand is said to have a “thickening of the lungs”, a finding which could characterize to any number of diseases. Blair illustrates subtly Lyngstrand’s ill heath through the carefulness of his gait and an inability to catch his breath quickly. While Lyngstrand’s physical condition may tend to make us sympathize with him, his views towards women do not. Blair’s Lyngstrand in his fine scene with Bolette outlines with complete insouciance his secure belief in men’s superiority to women and a wife’s bounden duty to serve her husband.
Andrew Bunker creates a fine portrait of Professor Arnholm, in whom inbred academic scruples contend with a new desire for affection. His humorously awkward scene of proposing to Bolette has the same mixture of sincerity and confused motives that one associates more with Chekhov. Neil Barclay is an ideal Ballested, capturing perfectly the figure’s unselfconscious blend of artistry and hucksterism reinforced with a fierce desire for survival at any cost.
Ibsen’s text specifies four locations for its five acts – an arbour in Doctor Wangel’s garden, a vista on a hill behind the town, a remote part of Wangel’s garden with a pond and a room inside Wangel’s house. Director Meg Roe has had designer Camellia Koo create only one set to serve as all these locations. It is a flat-topped rock apparently eroded by the tides so that its base is smaller than its upper portion. Kevin Lamotte’s moody lighting and the actors’ miming do well enough in signifying where we are except in the scene by the carp pond in Act 3, where actors mime fishing in a pond in front of the rock one moment only to have Ellida walk over the same space as if it were solid ground the next. Given that there is only a flat screen behind the rock, the rock is really too far forward in the playing area and will impede the view of anyone sitting on the left or right near the proscenium.
Erin Shields has adapted the play working from a French translation of the original. While this is hardly ideal, Shields provides a very natural sounding if somewhat streamlined version of the play that misses out nothing essential. The main difficulty of the production is Roe’s pacing which is far too rapid. This is a reflective play where characters give thought to momentous decisions. For that reason the action should not be rushed. Also, as usual in Ibsen, characters imply much more than they say and Roe should allow for significant pauses to give characters a greater chance to evaluate each other before speaking.
While some may like the fact that the play lasts only 90 minutes, others will wish there was an intermission. The natural place for an intermission is after Act 3 when The Stranger first appears and demands that Ellida make a decision by the following day. Not only would an intermission help indicate the passage of time in the drama, it will allow anyone who is seeing the show with friends a much-needed chance before the play ends to discuss Ellida’s and Wangel’s situation and what they thing the characters should do.
Aside from the needlessly breakneck pacing and the lack of an interval, this production of The Lady from the Sea is one no lover of the theatre should miss. Not only is the play seldom staged, but the play shows Ibsen in a different light from his better-known works. Here we see the man who loved his nation’s folklore as seen in his Peer Gynt (1867) as well as the master of realist drama. Ibsen promotes the same proto-feminist ideals as he does in A Doll’s House or in Hedda Gabler, but here he does so in a way that is much more akin to romance than tragedy. Because of this the play is not depressing but uplifting. It points to the great truth that possessiveness is not the same as love more clearly than in any of his other works – a truth as valid and important now as it is was in Ibsen’s day.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Moya O’Connell as Ellida and Ric Reid as Dr. Wangel, ©2015 David Cooper; Jacqueline Thair as Bolette and Andrew Bunker as Arnholm; Kyle Blair as Lyngstrand and Darcy Gerhart as Hilde, ©2015 Emily Cooper.
2015-08-05
The Lady from the Sea