✭✭✭✭✩

by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Marianne Elliott

National Theatre, Lyttleton Theatre

November 1, 2005-February 4, 2006

Yet another superb play about political machinations was Ibsen’s PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY in the Lyttleton Theatre at the National Theatre, in its first major professional production in London since a centennial production 1977.  Unlike Ibsen’s more claustrophobic plays such as “A Doll’s House” or “Hedda Gabler”, this play requires a cast of 19 which is probably also the reason it is not staged more often.  In analyzing the politics of a small town Ibsen manages to make critiques of the use and abuse of power that are so pertinent today the play could easily have been done in modern dress instead of period costume.  The small town’s fears of being connected to the outside world via a railway are like present day fears of globalization.  The central character, Karsten Bernick, claims to do all for the public good while lining his own pockets.  Sound familiar?  The power of Karsten Bernick, and tangentially that of four town elders, rests a lie that involves both Bernick’s his finances and his pose of morality.  When the two people involved in this lie return to town from America, his world falls apart.

In Marianne Elliott’s imaginative production, Bernick’s world literally falls apart.  His fabulous mansion had always looked like a big box set, but, just after the first revelations are made, the legs at the edges of the set fly up revealing the empty stage area around the “walls” and the structures supporting them.  From then on we have the intriguing view of events taking place in the main box of the set as well as in the areas to either side of it that were previously hidden.  It is a brilliant theatrical metaphor in itself as well as an apt metaphor for what is happening in the play.  Ibsen seems to set the action on a course of melodrama in the second half but instead deliberately pulls away from it for an ending that more ironic (and more contemporary) than melodrama ever would be. 

For the third time in a row, we had an absolutely flawless cast.  Damian Lewis played Bernick with a kind of pantherine intensity both in delivery and movement.  Lesley Manville as Lona Hessel created a character both proud and expansive who still held an aura of mystery throughout.  Joseph Millson, who was such a fine comic actor in the Spanish Golden Age season, showed a deeper, more troubled side as Johan Tønnesen.  Geraldine Alexander played Bernick’s wife Betty as if she were a forerunner of Nora in “A Doll’s House”.  Elliott even gave her an amplified door slam when she leaves the house finally to take matters into her own hands.  Michael Thomas evoked both laughter and pathos as the schoolteacher Rørlund, a pious archconservative who loves a woman young enough to be his daughter.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in the London Theatre Guide 2006-01-31.

Photo: (from top) Joseph Milsom and Damian Lewis; Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville. ©2005 Tristam Kenton.