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by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Anders Orbeck, directed by Mark Ewbank

Ottisdotter Productions, Barons Court Theatre, London, GBR

June 20-30, 2018

Olav: “Am I not to myself a mysterious riddle?”

Ottisdotter Productions, a plucky little company dedicated to rescuing plays from undeserved neglect, is now presenting Olaf, its adaptation of Ibsen’s 1857 play Olav Liljekrans.  While no one will claim that the play, written ten years before Peer Gynt and 22 years before A Doll’s House, is one of Ibsen’s greatest works, it is still a little gem that should not languish in obscurity.  It is Ibsen’s first realist play written primarily in prose and its characters clearly look forward to counterparts in the so-called Ibsen Cycle of his twelve great prose plays written from 1877 to 1899.  The chance to see Olav Liljekrans even in Norway is rare and to be able to see it in English is rarer still.  Ottisdotter’s production is the first in London since 1911 and will be the play’s longest-ever run in English.  Those facts alone are reason enough for any Ibsenite or anyone interested in 19th-century theatre to see it.

The play derives its title from the main character of the Norwegian version of the medieval Scandinavian ballad known as the Elveskud.  In the most common version of the ballad, Olav goes riding and comes upon an elf maiden who asks him to dance with her.  When he refuses because he is to be married the next day, the elf maiden casts a spell of fatal sickness on him and he rides home to his mother where he dies.

The most important point about Ibsen’s play, which he sets in the Middle Ages, is that Ibsen uses the story of the ballad primarily to subvert it.  The play is a comedy, not a tragedy, and although the characters refer to the influence of elves and nixies, Ibsen’s play eschews any influence of the supernatural.  His re-envisioning of the story basically says that there is no need to recur to the supernatural to explain the vagaries of human nature.  The play thus represents Ibsen’s shift away from Romantic drama toward Realist drama.

The play presents us with a familiar situation.  The heads of two feuding families have arranged a marriage between their children to settle the feud and link their adjoining properties.  The only problem is that the two children Olav (I will use the original spelling) and Ingeborg are not in love.  The play begins with Ingeborg’s father Arne of Guldvik (Che Watson) raging to his page Hemming (Joe Lewis) about the marriage and wondering why no one has seen Olav recently.  Lady Kirsten (Rebekka Magnúsdóttir) appears and after trying to cover up Olav’s disappearance, finally has to admit that no one has seen him since the betrothal celebration three days ago.  Arne and Lady Kirsten are quite aware that the woods around their estates are inhabited by elves and nixies and Hemming reminds them of a ballad of a young woman killed by an elf just before her wedding day.

Ingeborg (Sarah Madden) is not upset that Olav has gone missing or that the wedding may not take place.  She flirts with Hemming, who has always secretly adored her, and even gives him a gold ring as a token of love.

Given that the action takes place at midsummer, that an arranged marriage does not accord with the young people’s desires, that two couples flee the parents into an enchanted forest, we can only assume that Ibsen is writing a response not just to the Elveskud ballad but also to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The implied humour is that Ibsen’s version does not deal with kings and queens of Greek myth but with rural landholders in Norway and that no supernatural forces are needed to bring about confusion or resolution in the story.

Rosalind Murdoch has attractively designed the production on a low budget and, judging by the costumes, has moved the setting from the Middle Ages to sometime during the 19th century, perhaps at the time the play was written.  Mounds of flowers, two chairs and lanterns and subtle changes of light are all that are needed to evoke the three locations of the action in the small 12’x12’ playing area.

Ottisdotter’s production of Olav Liljekrans has all the makings of a charming, whimsical evening of theatre except that its cast is very uneven.  The evening gets off to a rough start with the long expository scene between Arne and Hemming.  As Arne, Che Watson starts out so big he leaves his character nowhere to go.  Shouting in a 57-seat theatre is simply unnecessary.  Watson is a young man playing a perpetually grumpy old man and he does nothing to avoid cliché.  By the end of Act 2 when Arne becomes more reflective and Watson lowers his voice to an ordinary speaking level, we see that he could have made Arne a subtler character if he had been so directed.

Joe Lewis’s Hemming is meant to be the calm foil to the exasperated Arne.  Lewis, however, though he speaks more clearly that most of the cast, remains bland as Arne’ page and worse, bland as Ingeborg’s would-be lover.  Rebekka Magnúsdóttir certainly has presence as Lady Kirsten, but her voice seems to have only two settings, loud and soft, and those are not enough to bring out the intricacies of this constantly scheming character who both deceives and is deceived.

Fortunately, the most effective performer in the show is Teddy Robson as Olav.  His first appearance as the seemingly mad Olav is disturbingly effective and throughout the action Robson radiates a natural intensity.  Later, when Olav’s mother has shaken him out of his dreamlike state, Robson makes us feel Olav’s disorientation and dismay at how ordinary his world has become.  When Olav is forced to abjure Alfhild, Robson makes us feel the rebellion boiling underneath.  When he is still unwell, Olav’s strange relationship with his mother seems to look forward to Oswald’s with Mrs. Alving in Ghosts (1881).  I hope Robson will move on to other meaty roles in the future.

As Alfhild, Grace Munroe speaks rather too quickly at first, but successfully captures the spirit of a young woman so transformed by love that she no longer sees the world as other people do.  When Alfhild is shaken out of her dream by Olav’s rejection of her, Munroe makes us feel enormous sympathy for her.  As an ecstatic visionary throughout most of the play, her character looks forward to Hilda in The Master Builder (1893).

Sarah Madden makes Ingeborg appear both flirtatious and untrustworthy, so that we worry that such a simple and kind young man as Hemming should be in love with her.  The daughter of a wealthy man falling in love with her father’s page seems to anticipate Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1889), and Madden gives Ingeborg the same hauteur and mental instability.  At the same time the glimpse Ibsen gives us of how the privileged Ingeborg is suddenly made uncomfortable by the reality of Hemming’s poverty makes her appear as a foreshadowing of Hedda Gabler (1891).

Director Mark Ewbank makes a several welcome appearances as Alfhild’s fiddler father Thorgjerd and in many ways appeals to us as the most sensible character in the play.  Ewbank edited Anders Orbeck’s 1921 translation for this production and omitted all but one of the many songs that Thorgjerd sings in the course of the play. For the one remaining Ewbank speaks only the words, but this he does so expressively one wishes he had not so heavily cut what must be Ibsen’s portrait of the artist.

As a director Ewbank’s best idea is not to erode the ambiguity of the first appearances of Olav and Alfhild.  It is good for us not to know whether Olav is mad or bewitched and not to know whether Alfhild is human or not.  This lends the play greater depth by implying that unfathomable mysteries lie within human nature itself.

Even if the performances are uneven, London is still very lucky to have a company like Ottisdotter willing to resurrect undeservedly neglected plays.  Plays from the past need to be seen on stage since that is the best way of judging their stage-worthiness.  Ottisdotter’s production proves that Olav Liljekrans is eminently stage-worthy and offers, especially in the characters of Olav and Alfhild, attractively challenging roles.  Olaf is the third in a trilogy of early Ibsen plays that Ottisdotter has produced.  I look forward to what obscure corners of theatre history it will illuminate next.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Grace Monroe as Alfhild and Teddy Robson as Olav; Rebekka Magnúsdóttir as Lady Kirsten. ©2018 Ottisdotter Productions.   

For tickets, visit https://www.ottisdotter.co.uk