Ibsen in Connecticut
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage IBSEN IN CONNECTICUT BY ALBERT BERMEL In a time when commercial theater is wasting away in New York, and off-off-Broadway appears, at best, to be regrouping its efforts, the city of New...
...Critics variously see her as the daughter Solness never had...
...The next best thing is to be a house-owner who has clambered onto his own roof to cope with a missing tile or some unstuck caulking...
...A troll is not a pixie...
...He also grew apart from his wife, and came to believe that he had incurred a tremendous debt to her after their children died in a fire...
...Edward VIII, with his ruined boy's face, bore no resemblance, physical or temperamental, to dynamic George Grizzard who, in this lost cause of impersonation, affects an English delivery that stiffens his frame with concentration and makes him support a grin all through the first act while his hands serve as fig leaves over his abdomen...
...He brought a number of its productions into New York (most recently The Changing Room...
...Simpson he may also have been, as the character banally affirms, "a man as well as a king...
...In one sequence, however, Hilde, for no apparent reason, lies on her back on a table, holding a bunch of flowers and imitating a corpse on a mortuary slab...
...In abdicating rather than giving up Mrs...
...The Yale Repertory season has begun with The Tempest set to Purcell's almost forgotten music, and will offer seven more new and novel-old shows...
...George VI ("Bertie") appears in the play, but Mrs...
...Though his business flourished, he felt himself dwindling...
...Whatever you do, it will all end in ignominy once your wife stops hearing that busy signal and gets through to the fire department...
...And in order that the banks of audience on opposite sides may have views of the performers' faces, he composes his actors as if they were sitting for that staple of moviemaking, over-the-shoulder shots...
...Now comes the test...
...the others are watching tensely under a combination of red...
...Solness is a man of the city, of civilization, a provider of houses...
...But most of what we see is a heavy smoker who depletes his mother's hoard of whisky, brandy and tea...
...as his guardian goddess...
...His Solness suffers most, though, from a lack of comic portentousness...
...He falls, and perhaps mankind falls with him...
...A couple of miles away the Long Wharf has defied our regional tradition of poverty-with-pride: Opening-night spectators of The Master Builder applauded prefatory speeches by Long Wharf officials that rejoiced in a subscription of 11,000 —a near-capacity quantity...
...Did you see Paul of Yugoslavia...
...In a transport she waves her shawl and cries, "My master builder...
...On Stage IBSEN IN CONNECTICUT BY ALBERT BERMEL In a time when commercial theater is wasting away in New York, and off-off-Broadway appears, at best, to be regrouping its efforts, the city of New Haven can congratulate itself on having two hyperactive companies...
...yellow and orange light, a sickly glow that portends disaster, if not the Cataclysm...
...In truth, she is all of these and more, everything that Solness is not...
...Solness, dressed like an undertaker, bends over her...
...The movements are posed and unimaginative, adding nothing...
...as the younger generation whom he fears because it may supplant him...
...For that defect —trying to be more than men— they pay with their lives, yet in paying they lift themselves above ridicule...
...The two leads employ contemporary American speech and mannerisms to set themselves off from the secondary characters, who are frozen into a quaint 19th-century stage-British formality...
...By contrast, E. G. Marshall (Solness) gabbles, throws away lines, and cuts in a bit ahead of time on his cues to create a speech pattern that is not always audible...
...The heroic occasion signaled the end of his earlier career of building churches to the glory of God and the start of his dedication to "homes for people...
...In the last act she will urge him to do the "impossible," to climb another tower with another wreath in his hand...
...Ten years to the day before the play starts, Solness scaled a tower for the first and only time in his life and placed a ribboned wreath at the top...
...Not until the last scene does the production harmonize with the play...
...The Chairman of the Board hugged the Artistic Director, Arvin Brown, so fervently that he threw him off balance...
...Clinging there, you suddenly find the pitch steeper than you expected, the handholds out of reach, and your ankles disobediently rubbery...
...Solness is a weird creature, too, governed by allegiance to her supposed "duty," rather than by impulses and aims...
...Wintry-blue-eyed old Mary, the Queen Mother of the British Empire in 1936, is played by brown-eyed, trombone-voiced Eileen Herlie, padded high and low and swathed in long, silvery garments to look like a fish standing on its tail...
...you have no idea whether the two are in opposition or collusion...
...To consolidate his strength he keeps away from experimental, nonrealistic drama and probably gives nobody offense...
...nor did Solness in his new career...
...Hilde is an independent (if not wild) spirit who has left her home for the outdoors—she enters wearing a hiking outfit and has spent time, as we learn, in the mountains...
...She is Hilde Wangel, a 22-year-old who watched him climb the tower when she was a child, ingratiated herself with him, and made him promise that they would meet 10 years later...
...But the people did not find happiness in their homes...
...With one sentence or so for each, the playwright similarly tours us past Karol of Rumania, Ataturk of Turkey, and Adolf of Germany...
...To appreciate the supernal feelings of Halvard Solness, the master builder in question, you must be a mountaineer or a steeplejack...
...If you are fatalistic you either hang on or jump...
...In Gretchen Corbett, Pendleton has discovered a genuine charmer to play Hilde...
...and we know that Solness' failure is a kind of salvation...
...Solness) keeps her hair untidy and her eyes unnaturally wide open, as if she had just been clobbered on the head and is still waiting for the pain to sink in...
...they underline the obvious and detract from the poetry of the encounter...
...He has remade Ibsen's giant in the image of an impatient Wall Street executive, a diminution all the more regrettable when one recalls his elegant performing in, say, Waiting for Godot or Kaspar...
...Brown put Long Wharf on the map...
...The actors' bodies slacken—all except Hilde's...
...Simpson does not...
...Ibsen is one of the few playwrights who can draw tragic consequences out of a comic premise...
...The real Edward might have been a king with a conscience, even a sense of mission, that did not suit the governing Conservatives: By saying something ought to be done about the plight of the Welsh miners, he incurred the anger of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin...
...God is above, the ground below...
...How was George of Greece...
...enticed celebrities to play (and stay) with the company...
...Yet in your ridiculous plight you will have known in miniature the mystical sensations that Ibsen is conjuring up...
...as the partner his wife could never be...
...When the King returns from a European trip Mama's political curiosity prompts him into giving a rundown of what royalty and the various heads of government are up to...
...Still, between her and her husband there is none of the unforced intimacy, the separate-ness, that he enjoys with Hilde...
...But she compromises her considerable talent by leaving little time-slots before important words, and then helps herself utter them by flapping her hands and wagging her head and working her brow muscles...
...He vaguely hopes to discharge that debt by building her a new house, which she does not want...
...Although terrified of heights, he will try, succeed and then fall...
...Then, turning confidential, she lowers her head to the level of his...
...She rises—she is talking about the tower —and dwarfs him...
...Nor does the humblest muse...
...She enunciates so fastidiously that one imagines every word will be her last...
...as his demon or troll or nemesis...
...The relationship between them is a clash of opposites: female and male, youth and age, selflessness and egotism, confidence and uncertainty, obscurity and fame, will and action...
...In his staging Pendleton has not devised any interesting uses for the Long Wharf's low thrust platform, which confers on the play the novelty of three walls missing instead of one...
...Nor do the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent...
...Reminding him that he once called her his princess, Hilde sets about enchanting Solness all over again, partly by being herself, an irresistible nymph, and partly by exciting his sense of supremacy—an overweening passion in him...
...and hired a demonstrably effective "director of audience development...
...In September, during the autumn of his life, a figure arrives out of Solness' past...
...Ibsen's characters go down because their boundless aspirations (including immortality) are ridiculous...
...The rest of the characters are like strangers to these two, who inhabit a word land of bizarre assertions and allusions only they understand...
...Mysticism has been replaced by fidgeting...
...The back home at the Helen Hayes the first import since devaluation is Crown Matrimonial, a laughable domestic fantasy by Royce Ryton...
...she inquires...
...Geraldine Fitzgerald (Mrs...
...It is perhaps a sign of Brown's confidence that he has begun his eighth year at Long Wharf by handing this season's first production over to a guest director, Austin Pendleton, who made his own adaptation of Ibsen's text and presents it as a study in neuroses...
...If you are reckless you try to scramble up to the chimney stack where, should you make it, you will look less like a master builder than a master antenna...
...Solness is offstage, ascending the tower...
...What are we to make of Hilde...
Vol. 56 • November 1973 • No. 22
