✭✭✭✩✩

by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Neil Munro

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

July 15-October 7, 2006

"A Glimpse into the Abyss"

In many critics’ minds, “Rosmersholm” (1886) vies with its immediate predecessor “The Wild Duck” (1884) as Ibsen’s greatest play.  Yet, “Rosmersholm” is much less frequently produced.  In fact, the current production at the Shaw Festival is one of the few professional productions of the play in Canada since the Shaw’s last production of it in 1974.  Fans of Ibsen will not want to miss the current production, but to enjoy it they will have to try so disregard the many annoyances of director Neil Munro’s updated adaptation to see the source that underlies it. 

“Rosmersholm” is one of Ibsen’s most enigmatic works.  It is part of a series of plays following “An Enemy of the People” (1882) in which Ibsen turned from writing overtly political drama engaged with the here and now to the fully symbolic drama of his later years.  The play begins as a political play.  A small town in western Norway has become bitterly divided into camps of liberals and conservatives.  The recent rise of liberal ideas has sparked a backlash led by archconservatives like the school headmaster Kroll.  He comes to enlist the aid of Johan Rosmer, a former clergyman, to his side.  Rosmer, however, under the influence of Rebecca West, a woman who nursed his ailing wife until his wife’s suicide, has not only renounced conservatism and embraced liberalism but now seeks a means beyond both to “emancipate” mankind. 

Unfortunately, the virulent political climate of the town means that all private behaviour has become politicized.  Rosmer, scion of the greatest family of the town, can no longer remain aloof even if he wanted to.  The fact that he lives in the same house with his late wife’s caregiver can now easily be used as fodder against the liberal cause.  But when Rosmer asks Rebecca to marry him, she refuses.  The dark secret that motivates that decision overwhelms both Rosmer and Rebecca and points to an abyss in the human soul that completely obliterates the importance of political quarrels.  The play’s sudden shift to love tragedy forces the audience to rethink the action.  By the play’s ending we know what has happened but precisely why remains an unsettling mystery.

Neil Munro’s adaptation of Charles Archer’s 1891 translation tries to make the play easier for the audience by updating it and de-Norwegianizing it.  The action, instead of taking place “Rosmersholm, an old manor-house in the neighbourhood of a small town on a fjord in western Norway” in the 1880s, now takes place “at the House of Rosmer, an old family seat, somewhere in Europe between the wars”.  Despite the title, “Rosmersholm” is awkwardly called “Rosmer House” through Munro’s version.  Rebecca comes from “up North”, not Finmark”.  Philosopher Ulrik Brendel becomes Ulrich and the publisher Peter Mortensgaard becomes Morten and somehow a “foreigner” besides.  In most translations, Rosmer and Rebecca refer to each other as Mr. Rosmer and Miss West in public and Johan and Rebecca in private.  Munro tries to modernize their intimacy my having them call each other “Roz” and “Beck” in private, which remains annoyingly 21st-century and inappropriately cute for two characters about to be engulfed by tragedy.

Munro undermines the point of universalizing the play’s location by making the politics of the play too specific.  In Ibsen the clash is a very general one between liberals and conservatives.  In Munro’s version we hear of communists and the “Christian Right” and Munro goes beyond Ibsen to turn the reactionary Kroll into a proto-fascist by making him both anti-Semitic and xenophobic.  The language Munro uses bears every resemblance to political cant in the 2000s but not to the 1920s or ‘30s, much less to the original play. 

The most inexcusable change Munro makes is in Ibsen’s imagery.  First he has done away with the symbolic white shawl-cum-shroud that Rebecca is supposed to be working on throughout the play and that links her to the weaving Fates of both Greek and Norse myth.  Worse, he has expunged Ibsen’s White Horses of Rosmersholm.  In the original phantom white horses appear near the manor signalling that a death at Rosmersholm is immanent.  In fact, the original title of the play was “White Horses”.  For unknown reasons, Munro changes this dynamic image to the much weaker one of “white mist”.  The White Horses clearly relate to Ibsen’s theme of an unknowable, unstoppable force that comes from the past to trample down the present.  A sedentary “white mist” simply does not have this connotation.

At least, Munro closely follows the Ibsen’s plot and the way the dialogue plays out.  He adds an unnecessary first scene in which the housekeeper Mrs. Helseth breaks a figurine of Napoleon and he stops the dialogue several pages before Ibsen does.  This last, however, is a brilliant choice.  After Rosmer demands proof of Rebecca’s love, they enact in silence the realization the effect of Rosmer’s demand on both of them and the sacrifice it entails.  This ending captures the poignancy of a feeling that overwhelms speech words that Ibsen’s original conclusion with Mrs. Helseth’s narrative of events does not.

Even if it is hard to see past the quirks of Munro’s adaptation, there is no doubt that this is a gripping, well-acted production.  Patrick Galligan gives one of his best-ever performances as Rosmer portraying an idealist out of touch both with the darkness of everyday reality and of the human heart.  Galligan plays the essentially weak Rosmer with such sympathy that it is painful to see his illusions so thoroughly shattered when we know he has no reserves to withstand the blows.

Waneta Storms is an atypical choice for Rebecca.  Rather than having a naturally forceful actress play at humbleness until she can come into her own in the second half of the play, Munro has chosen Storms, who naturally communicates the kind of humbleness and calm Rebecca says she has reached by living with Rosmer.  Storms rises to the challenge of her disastrous encounter with Kroll, but her portrayal of Rebecca has been so sympathetic that her dark secret when revealed sounds too unlike her to be believable.  For this confession to have its full effect we need to have seen greater evidence of an iron will underlying Rebecca’s calm demeanour.

Peter Hutt makes an excellent Kroll.  He manages to create a more rounded figure that the rabid neocon Munro’s adaptation has made of him.  He suggests that Kroll is so vindictive toward Rebecca because he is still infatuated with her and can deal with his feelings only by destroying her.  His Kroll is both comic in the certainty of his regressive ideas and dangerous in his ruthlessness.

In smaller roles, Peter Millard plays Ulrich Brendel, Rosmer’s mentor, as a man who once may have been charismatic thinker but whose disdain for everything else in the world has started to include himself.  As Rosmer’s housekeeper Mrs. Helseth, Patricia Hamilton provides a much-needed earthy presence in a house dominated by ideas.  Munro unnecessarily gives her a dead spouse to quote rather than having her words be her own, but her compromised way of maintaining propriety while spreading gossip still shines as a comic reflection of the central plot.  Douglas E. Hughes has a fine turn as Peter Morten, significantly appearing much more level-headed and either Kroll or Rosmer has made him out to be.

Peter Hartwell’s set aptly reflects the themes of Rosmersholm with four dark wooden love-seats shaped rather like Art Deco pews.  He has followed Munro in updating the costumes to the interwar period all in browns and blacks giving the stage picture the gloomy look of a sepia print.  To represent the presence of centuries of dead ancestors, empty picture frames hang from the ceiling on the three sides of the Court House stage.  The window Ibsen specifies for the back of the set has been replaced with a screen where Simon Clemo’s video projections glow.  Before each act we see an external view of the manor, but once the action begins the picture changes to portraits of stern men in 19th-century garb.  Clemo has created a beautiful montage to suggest what happens after Rosmer and Rebecca’s exit in Munro’s highly effective silent ending.  Kevin Lamotte’s sepulchral lighting conjures up a world where little light of any kind, spiritual or natural, has ever entered.   

The opportunities for seeing this great play in a production of this calibre are so few that anyone interested should not miss it.  Munro’s adaptation will grate and one will wish he had left the master playwright’s imagery intact.  Nevertheless, the disturbing essentials of the play come through and you may find yourself haunted for days by Rosmer and Rebecca’s profoundly unsettling glimpse into an existential abyss.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Patrick Galligan and Waneta Storms. ©David Cooper.