Word: ellida
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...first professional performance in Boston of Ibsen's 'The Lady from the Sea'" is the boast of the Repertory Theatre for the present fortnight. Duse delighted in the role of Ellida, the lady from the sea. It required every lota of her energy and that of her company to carry the emotional strain which the playwright puts upon his puppets. And now Repertory advertises a professional performance...
...upon Ellida Wangel, the Lady from the Sea, that the unforgiving light of Ibson's querying is focused. And it is upon her that the whole burden of the play must fall. The unfolding of the story which is in reality an unfolding of her mind, a mind wedded to the sea, is a rapid matter, swift, sure and inevitable up to the very close. A Duse alone could maintain the tempo, with no waste gestures, no amateur hysterics which might interrupt the play's relentlessness. Two weeks of rehearsal of such a part sound farewal. Yet that...
...Lady from the Sea is considered by critics one of the lesser works of Ibsen. It centers entirely on the character of Ellida which has " suffered a sea change" through years of lonely residence in a lighthouse. She is distant, disturbing, detached. Into her early life there had come a wandering sailor who had taken her heart away with him upon his travels. Thinking him drowned, she had married a stuffy country doctor. The sailor returns...
Obviously the action of the play is largely psychological. Without Ital- ian much of this drama must necessarily drown, like Ellida's sailor, among the waves of unfriendly verbs and consonants. But for the performance of the great tragedienne, the production would be worse than worthless...
Alexander Woollcott: "Her performance of Ellida Wangel was among the few truly beautiful and exhilarating things which we have seen in our time...