Word: borkman
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Martin Guerre is the big news and the big disappointment in a London season filled with intimate epics (all of War and Peace in 4 1/2 affecting hours!), incandescent stars (a ragged but potent revival of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman with Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave), one thrilling biodrama (Pam Gems' Stanley, on English painter Stanley Spencer) and lots of musicals about dead pop singers (Buddy, Elvis and, for Pete's sake, Jolson...
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN by Henrik Ibsen
This play may carry a jinx. Each the infrequent attempts to stage it in the U.S. in the past quarter-century has proved monumentally inert, and the present production at Broadway's Circle in the Square is no exception. Borkman is a wintry drama, a sort of autopsy blanched ruined lives...
...bank is not all that John Gabriel has destroyed. He jilted the only woman he loved, Gunhild's twin sister Ella Rentheim (Irene Worth) in order to climb the ladder of success. Dying of an unnamed malady, Ella returns to claim the Borkman's son Erhart (Freddie Lehne), whom she had reared during Borkman's disgrace. Gunhild wants him to redress the family honor. In a bitter confrontation scene, the two sisters drink from the cup oof the past as if it were vitriol...
After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene...