Word: ibsenism
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...Marber's biting comedy Closer as well as the one touch of tattered grace in a plebeian revival of Streetcar. And though Londoners shouldn't have been surprised by the way Richardson could wrap an audience in her spell, she was a revelation in Trevor Nunn's take on Ibsen's Lady from the Sea. The plot is high harlequin: a dark and stormy night, a chronically sensitive young wife aching for a strong rogue to free her from the marital cage. But Richardson let star quality shine through, with a grandeur audiences had been hoping for since her youth...
...This 1947 drama, Miller's first stage success, centers on Joe Keller, a manufacturer who knowingly shipped defective airplane parts during World War II. (It's quintessential Miller, which means quintessential Ibsen: there's no real action, just reaction to the revelation of long-hidden secrets.) Miller's indictment of business ethics and portrait of a family in crisis can seem overwrought, but McBurney's solution is to go the playwright one better; his expressionistic devices imbue the play with tragic universality. The capable cast includes John Lithgow as Joe, Dianne Wiest as his wife, and Patrick Wilson...
...played by last-matinee-idol Clooney, has been screwing Cox's icy-beautiful wife (Tilda Swinton) and recently emerged from 20 years in the Secret Service "without ever discharging my weapon" - which is as sure a clue at the firearm of the wall in the first act of an Ibsen play that Harry's gun will be fired. He has the patter down pat, but something, maybe his fascination with the floors in the houses he visits, tells you that this Clooney smoothie is following the dictum the Coens laid down for all their actors: "to channel your inner knucklehead...
...sensation right from his college days. Sten Selander, reviewing Bergman's Death of Punch at Stockholm University's Student Theater, wrote in Svenska Dagbladet: "No debut in Swedish has given such unambiguous promise for the future." A budding Scandinavian dramatist, with Ibsen and Strindberg as his models, might devote himself fully to the theater. That indeed would be Bergman's full-time job, heading stage companies in Malmo and then Stockholm, directing productions that toured through Europe and later the U.S. and won him the reputation as a great and daring interpreter of the classics. (His productions of Long...
...Really, I'm trying to be Ibsen. That's my secret hope: that I could somehow turn into [the playwright Henrik] Ibsen. There are things happening all the time to real people. You don't have to enact them or write them. I'm trying to make a play, not an educational device...