John Gabriel Borkman - Henrik Ibsen

Dublin Fringe Festival:
Focus Theatre
October 1 - November 2

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Henrik Ibsen

    As the program notes for the Dublin Fringe Festival point out, Ibsen’s penultimate play is one with particular resonance for contemporary Ireland. It is the story of a banking scandal in which an ambitious man has forged ahead with his personal vision of economic success with scant regard for the human cost of his actions. This is where the resonance stops though. Written in 1896, the play feels rooted to a sense of the world which is firmly nineteenth century in social and psychological detail. Though it is a thematically intriguing study of the demands and dangers of industrial capitalism for the human soul, the play has been dated by the passage of time. The high-minded speeches about the purity of economic ambition do not sit well with the grubbier side of contemporary fiscal corruption, making it not so much an apt text for contemporary Ireland as one which provides an interesting sense of perspective.
    John Gabriel Borkman is only one short step from melodrama though, and can topple into it when the balance of performance slips. Its cold-eyed sincerity and high-minded sobriety does not sit well with a postmodern intellect. Its ironies are either too gentle or too obvious, and its application of metaphor (a "hand of iron" -- a heart attack -- eventually fells this son of a miner who dreamed of building an empire from the (literal) ground up) is too direct to pass without a faint guffaw. The story is familiar from decades of imitation, and there is at least one scene, where characters with competing hopes for the future attempt to sway a young man to share each of their individual dreams, which plays like the cliffhanger of a bad soap opera.
    In spite of such complication, the Focus Theatre’s production works very well. The Focus was established with the aim of foregrounding the Stanislavski method, and though the rigors of theatrical dogma may hold less sway now than they did in the 1960s, the theatre does tend to promote character-based drama. Designer Carmel Nugent does everything she can to draw attention away from her work. A gray stage with gray walls and gray furniture greets the audience as they arrive, and stately classical guitar music sets a tone of serenity and propriety. When the actors appear, they are fully costumed in the garb of nineteenth century ladies and gentlemen, standing out from the background physically just as their performances will stand out from the storytelling.
    There is great delicacy in the characterization. The actors are required to find a depth of authentic emotion in the stiff-limbed attitudes and spoken platitudes of these characters. They must also keep the lurking specter of thespian hysteria at bay. Áine Ní Mhuirí is immediately believable as Borkman’s wife Gunhild. Her birdlike demeanor and sense of anger restrained by denial is an important entry point for the audience, and the actor gets it just right in the opening scenes. The play establishes a world of compartmentalized space and emotional stasis, with husband and wife occupying separate floors and separate worlds. As John waits upstairs for the world to understand why he was right to embezzle those funds, Gunhild dreams of her son Erhart (David Johnston) redeeming the family name. As Borkman himself, Vincent McCabe is also dead on target. His fierce eyes, curly reddish hair and graying beard make him seem imposingly Scandinavian, and the actor successfully conveys his character’s implacable resolution to make the world bend to his interpretation of it.
    It is this sense of a self-determined psychological space at odds with the realities of society which defines the characterizations and which gives Ibsen’s writing its enduring quality. It also gives the actors an opportunity to explore and develop these characterizations relative to personalities which are equally strongly-defined. The drama itself takes place mostly in the past however, with characters in the present discussing events long over. This makes it difficult to generate on-stage conflict, and to give narrative meat to Ibsen’s philosophical bones. The playwright is skilled enough to ensure that the ripples of history affect the living moment, so the story unfolds through a series of collisions over grand aspirations. Again this is a challenge for the actors. They must balance exposition with speculation in a way which most contemporary plays no longer require of them. With scenes as delicately played as that between McCabe and Johnny Murphy as Borkman’s only friend Wilhelm Fodal (a white-collar drone who dreams of being a poet and playwright) where the two men discuss friendship, art, ethics, and family, the audience is drawn into an intimate performance space in which the creaking plot becomes entirely secondary.