Word: ibsenism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Doll's House. Christopher Hampton adapts Ibsen's play and refuses to capitalize on its Feminist aspects; he doesn't have to, they are built in. But when Patrick Garland brings it to the screen he cops out in the film on what is most effective in the play. Nora (Claire Bloom) has that sort of perfect fine-featured face with lines of tension at the edges that tell you about the anxiety she suffers in living up to the Victorian ideal of feminity: women should be seen and not heard. She finally slams the door...
...Doll's House. Christopher Hampton adapts Ibsen's play and refuses to capitalize on its Feminist aspects; he doesn't have to, they are built in. But when Patrick Garland brings it to the screen he cops out in the film on what is most effective in the play. Nora (Claire Bloom) has that sort of perfect fine-featured face with lines of tension at the edges that tell you about the anxiety she suffers in living up to the Victorian ideal of feminity: women should be seen and not heard. She finally slams the door...
...famous door-slamming exit that climaxes Ibsen's once scandalous play about a bourgeois woman liberating herself from a claustrophobic marriage no longer shocks. The melodramatic blackmail plot in which she is ensnared for much of the time now seems a rather forced theatrical convention, not worthy of the playwright's thesis or a modern audience's interest. Its disclosure to her husband, which in turn exposes him as a hypocrite more concerned about his own status than his wife's reputation, seems both simple-minded and rather too specifically linked to a time (the late...
Christopher Hampton's adaptation transcribes rather than transcends Ibsen's antique dramaturgy, while Patrick Garland's direction is curiously uninflected, so the whole enterprise gives off the air of a respectful college theatrical. As Nora Helmer, Claire Bloom seems to substitute aspiration for inspiration-a windup doll whose spring is not wound tightly enough under the tensions of dull domesticity in the early going, and who completely runs down in the final confrontation with her husband. As her antagonist, Anthony Hopkins acts more like a spoiled adolescent than an oppressor to reckon with. A quartet of worthy...
...finest compliment one can pay the off-Broadway Roundabout Theater revival is that it brings out all the Joycean echoes in Ibsen. When it falters, it is simply that few actors are intrepid enough to scale the sheer rock face of Ibsen's perdurable realities. ∙T.E.K...