On Stage

SIMON, JOHN

On Stage LOST LADIES BY JOHN SIMON Starting in 1877, when he produced Pillars of Society, Ibsen was to turn out one of his great, late plays every two years. The exceptions were An Enemy of the...

...The play has a double action...
...The exceptions were An Enemy of the People, a reply to his critics that, in the heat of controversy, took one year to write...
...Allison Argo might be a convincing Hilde if she could lose her thick New York accent...
...There are obvious parallels between the main plot and the underplot: In both an older and wiser man wins a woman by being willing to let her go, and the two women make certain concessions for their gains...
...luckily, it is mostly Shaw...
...The Lady from the Sea is one of Ibsen's less felicitous plays...
...and When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen's last, written in the shadow of death and so taking three years...
...The sea laps away at our ears, and the merest mention of The Stranger brings on Richard Peaslee's harp arpeggios sounding perilously like a gussied-up "Ebb Tide...
...The subplot revolves around Bolette, the elder...
...also Lyngstrand, as Bolette's ineffectual lover, and Amholm, the man who knows how to obtain her...
...Meanwhile, on the last tourist steamer of summer, Johnston arrives, claiming Ellida for his own...
...Perhaps under pressure from Richardson, she becomes a human wreck bordering on a nervous breakdown rather than what, to me, appears as a brooding neurotic lost in the mists of vagueness...
...Miss Andreas sang very nicely indeed, but could neither act nor look the part—or, rather, parts—of Eliza: She had neither the true guttersnipe querulousness of the Cockney flower vendor, nor the grandeur of Higgins's Galatea—a duchess more real than a real one—although she at least managed the requisite accents fairly well for an American...
...Hilde, the younger, particularly detests her, because she craves an affection the stepmother is unable to grant...
...He had to leave, and though Ellida never answered his letters from far places, she remained under his spell until she married Dr...
...Out of this mighty dozen masterpieces and near-masterpieces, 1 find only the entries for 1886 and '88 less than satisfying...
...All this, of course, is another fault of the direction, which makes fairly good use of the aisles as acting areas but tends to leave the actors stranded...
...Yet the show is not old enough to support such reverence—if any show ever is...
...In addition, Ibsen errs by explaining too much, by repeating certain phrases or points over and over...
...George Rose, on the other hand, was both wickedly boisterous and grandly crestfallen as Doolittle, and Brenda Forbes made the most of what is left of Shaw's Mrs...
...Behind the characters we are forced to perceive something worse even than an obtrusive playwright: a schoolmaster...
...and, again, between the gentle but determined Bolette, and the willful yet insecure Hilde...
...She was once involved with a mysterious sailor who called himself first Friman and later Alfred Johnston, who killed his captain for supposedly good reasons, then "married" her in a mystic ceremony that had them exchanging rings before casting them into the sea...
...the choreography and staging by the former assistants to Hanya Holm and Moss Hart are faithful reproductions as well...
...The evening's one unqualified fiasco was Jerry Lanning's Freddy, who looked like a Midwestern football player in a college production of a Wilde play, and bellowed as if he were cheerleading...
...Robert Coote, the sole holdover from the original production, has aged too much for even the modest requirements of Pickering's part...
...He has consumption, and everyone but he knows that he is doomed, which has an unholy fascination for Hilde, a disturbing young girl...
...We do not even get a sense of her ambivalent attitude toward her husband, or of any strong attraction to The Stranger...
...Richardson has cast the play badly...
...In both Rosmersholm and The Lady from the Sea, ideas and symbols seemed to get the better of the dramatist...
...A full-scale revival should have found its own ways of approaching the material...
...The main plot concerns Ellida, a lighthouse-keeper's daughter in love with the sea...
...The book is superb where it is Shaw and anticlimactic where it is Lerner...
...After a slow start, Kimberly Farr grows into a persuasive Bolette, nicely balanced on the edge between spinsterhood and passion...
...To make things worse, arena staging permits us to see the audience on the far side of the acting area squirming and emoting, and does not help create a sense of wind-swept Nordic isolation...
...But as Kenneth Tynan long ago pointed out, it is distressing to have Higgins commit gross grammatical errors, one of the worst ("hung" for hanged) in a lament over abuses of the English language...
...Higgins...
...Scarcely better is Kipp Osborne's Lyngstrand, a dithering simpleton who, had he lived, would surely have become another Ballested...
...Nor are his two daughters by his first wife at ease with Ellida...
...At last, however, he gives her full freedom of choice, which prompts her to reject The Stranger and become a true wife...
...Not in love with him, Bolette refuses...
...Throughout, I distinctly felt that what was on most people's minds was to win the prize for the best My Fair Lady impersonation at some costume party...
...Pat Hingle finds no way of making Wangel appealing, and although he looks Norwegian enough, continues to sound faintly Texan—or is it just whiny...
...Rouben Ter Arutunian's set is heavy on cosmic symbolism, and his costuming never allows Ellida to wear anything but sea colors...
...Fortunately, John Heffernan, his distracting mannerisms under sufficient control, properly renders Arnholm as both likable and mildly exasperating...
...Here too is the impecunious young sculptor, Lyngstrand, boyishly in love with Bolette and on his way to Italy, where a benefactor is sending him...
...indeed, Rosmersholm has proved reasonably popular in the theater...
...They had one child who died in infancy, whom Ellida believed to have the wild, sea-colored eyes of Johnston...
...Herman Levin, the producer of the original My Fair Lady, has now come up with a revival that tries to re-create that original as nearly as possible...
...The present production compounds this error by eschewing anything that remotely resembles subtlety...
...A quiet obsession is turned into frazzled hysteria, foroing us to withold our sympathy from the heroine...
...She is loved by her former tutor, the decent but awkward Professor Arnholm, who comes back to the Wangel home in a small northern-Norwegian fjordside town on the mistaken notion that Bolette now cares for him...
...Always in love with the sea, the distraught woman perceives The Stranger (as Ibsen calls him throughout) as some elemental, marine force summoning her to a fantastic destiny...
...people and plots had a way of turning into abstractions and schemata...
...Frederick Loewe's music remains delectable in tune after expert tune and the Alan Jay Lerner lyrics are effective, too...
...That does not mean the two plays are unstageworthy...
...Ellida is tempted, the more so because Wangel, in his narrow, patriarchal way, thinks he can forbid her going for her own supposed good...
...Nonetheless, this strikes me as My Fair to Middling Lady...
...Wan-gel, a much older widower...
...Placing Beaton's original, elaborate costume for Eliza at the ball on Christine Andreas' dumpy figure, for example, proves the undoing of both...
...fighting it is poor, loyal Dr...
...Otherwise, the situations are complementary opposites: Ellida must give up her romantic obsessions and settle down to a safe, bourgeois existence, whereas Bolette is to be allowed new learning and experiences abroad...
...The prevalent grey of the set remains the same throughout, the Wangel's front yard having to double improbably as a mountain lookout...
...Worst of all is Richard Lynch as a Stranger who, far from being bushy-haired, red-bearded and piercing-eyed, comes across as a somewhat petulant blond beach boy...
...George Ede is an adequate, albeit routine, Ballested, full of stock bluster...
...In all these characters Ibsen was clearly trying to come to terms with his own dualities and contradictions, as he did in other plays...
...But he gives us too many contrary or complementary relationships that require too many crises and turnabouts, too many sudden and unconvincing resolutions for the play to end...
...That leaves what I consider to be the major disappointment, Vanessa Redgrave's Ellida...
...The older man now generously offers her the needed money unconditionally, whereupon she winds up accepting both his money and him...
...Arnholm discovers Bolette's secret yearning to study and work in the big world and proposes to stake her to travel and education, if she will take his hand in marriage...
...After the child's death, Ellida could no longer be a real wife to Wangel...
...The arrangements remain unchanged, and an air of museumlike veneration hovers over the whole production...
...Lady is seen less frequently, and so made me all the more expectant about Tony Richardson's staging of it for the Circle in the Square, with his ex-wife, Vanessa Redgrave, making her long overdue New York debut...
...The Stranger gives Ellida a day to make up her mind: If she won't go to sea with him, he will depart forever...
...This, regrettably, was not true of Ian Richardson, who, unlike Rex Harrison, made Higgins uncharming, nasty-minded, almost Machiavellian, and, worst of all, sometimes slimy...
...Wangel, who loves Ellida without understanding her, keeps suggesting simplistic solutions, and consoles himself with the bottle...
...There is also a polarity between Wangel and The Stranger—the ultimately reasonable and the intransigent lover...
...still, it need not suffer the sea change Richardson and company have inflicted on it...
...There are other complementary figures in the play: Lyngstrand, the idealistic sculptor, and Ballested, a cynical painter who sold out...
...The Oliver Smith sets and the Cecil Beaton costumes are the same...

Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8


 
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