TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Little Eyolf
Jermyn Street Theatre
Spring 2011
One
of Ibsen's least-performed plays - its last London appearance, at the
National Theatre two years ago, was in a radically rewritten and
anglicised adaptation - displays all its difficulties in this generally
unsuccessful small-scale production.
A married woman is
so insecure that she is insanely jealous of her husband's dedication to
their crippled son. When the boy dies, both have to re-evaluate their
relationship, their feelings for each other and their individual sense
of their place in a confusing universe.
Ibsen explores much
of this through the characters' painful self-examination and discussion
of their thoughts and feelings. But, lacking Shaw's ability or
inclination to make intellectual debate theatrically exciting for its
own sake, Ibsen depends on our empathising with the characters enough
to care about their problems.
And that is where
this production falls apart. Through a string of director's and actors'
errors, we are kept from feeling the pity or concern for the characters
that would make their struggles to sort out their thoughts matter to
us.
The Jermyn Street
Theatre is a tiny space, and one of director Anthony Biggs' first
errors is to encourage or allow Imogen Stubbs as the wife to play much
too big for the room. By projecting her voice and scaling her actions
as if she were in a much larger theatre, she never seems to be
inhabiting the same reality as the generally underplaying other actors.
Worse, her broad
playing leaves the actress little space for subtleties or emotional
transitions, so that her character seems repeatedly to leap without
warning from one sort of hysteria to another. As a result, the woman
comes across as so barking mad from the start that we can never
empathise with her, while the adventure of Jonathan Cullen's husband
becomes not just coping with his child's death and the self-doubting
aftermath, but having to live with this decidedly unpleasant shrew.
(I hasten to note
that Imogen Stubbs is a talented actress capable of subtlety and
delicate touches. If she has made some unwise choices in this
performance, the blame must be shared with director Biggs for not
guiding her away from them.)
There are other
problems in Ibsen's text that the director and actors haven't found a
way to master. Though Jonathan Cullen does generate some sympathy for
the husband (even if, as I noted, the wrong kind), without anyone to
bounce off in the long discussion scenes, his self-exploration begins
to feel like annoying self-absorption.
A subplot involving
the husband's half-sister and her not-exactly-sisterly feelings for him
seems to belong to some other play despite the quietly sensitive
playing of Nadine Lewington, and the abrupt insertion of a
quasi-supernatural character only lures Doreen Mantle into a kind of
overacting her director should have helped her avoid.
At its best, Little
Eyolf is a difficult text that challenges any director and actors to
find their way through its minefield. In this case they haven't.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Little Eyolf - Jermyn Street 2011
