halfbloodprincess78 |
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| Recensione da Pag 394 Traduzione a cura di Giulia NerucciWinter chill
A new production of a rare and all-too-relevant play
Ibsen's “John Gabriel Borkman”
Jan 20th 2011 | NEW YORK
HENRIK IBSEN understood the cloying power of the sumptuous drawing room. The heavy furniture and stale air, the binding corsets and suffocating mores; what could be more maddening? In such cosy prisons minds don’t merely wander, they race. So it is with “John Gabriel Borkman”, Ibsen’s penultimate play, about a disgraced former bank manager who pads around like “a sick wolf” in the cage of his home. Jailed for years, he now sulks in his study while his aggrieved wife prowls around downstairs. The action takes place on a single winter evening in rooms as frigid as the surrounding snow.
Anyone who sees the Abbey Theatre’s production, now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will wonder why this play is not staged more often. It is not just that the 19th-century drama feels timely; it concerns a cocky man who misused other people’s money. In the right hands, as in this version directed by James Macdonald, “John Gabriel Borkman” tells a deeper story about the desperate ways people try to make sense of their lives. Too miserable to comprehend the present, the characters cling to false memories and delusional expectations. “Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in,” Ibsen once observed.
Tom Pye’s elegant set mixes shiny dark surfaces with stark white snow. The colour comes from the performances. A grand cast, working from a new translation by Frank McGuinness, features Alan Rickman as the titular banker, Fiona Shaw as his vengeful wife and Lindsay Duncan as her estranged sister and his betrayed lover—a fiercer trio can hardly be found on the modern stage. The tricky roles veer close to melodrama, but these actors find their humanity, and deliver tension to scenes that might otherwise feel overlong.
Lonely and dying, Ella (a dignified and restrained Ms Duncan) pays a surprise visit to her family’s estate. She hopes to convince her nephew, Erhart, to live with her again. But her twin sister, Gunhild, who is Erhart’s mother, has other plans for the young man. Hobbled by the “filthy disgrace” of her husband’s crimes and righteous in her innocence (“How could I know it wasn’t his own money he gave me to squander?”), she clings to Erhart in the belief that he will clear the family name. In Ms Shaw’s hands, Gunhild is no one-note harpy. Limping about and brimming with noxious anger, she makes it difficult to look elsewhere on stage.
Mr Rickman makes for a delicately grim Borkman. Abandoned yet impenitent, he spends his days brooding and waiting for the day he will be vindicated. Though he never goes out, he is dressed immaculately, from his cravat to his shiny shoes, ever prepared for when his bank colleagues “come up here, get down on bended knees and beg me to come back”, he says in that dark-chocolate voice of his. Seduced by power, he tossed aside his love for Ella in order to create the kingdom of his dreams. Now he is bankrupt and loveless, with only his delusions to keep him going. “Isn’t it a very mysterious thing—human happiness—how it works out?” asks Borkman’s lone friend, a humble poet. Mysterious indeed, especially for these unhappy souls.
www.economist.com/node/17956731?sto...FTOKEN=44304360Edited by chiara53 - 30/6/2022, 19:39 |
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... ma si rende conto che se sa che lo ha citato lo invita subito ad Arcore?! 
