Word: rubek
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pattern of Rubek's earlier life is a sort of Pygmalion theme in reverse: the sculptor has found a perfect woman and taken from her the soul he needs for his marble masterpiece. Irene, the model for the statue, has loved him desperately but without the slightest response. When the work is complete she leaves him, her soul shattered and his ground away by the forces of creation. Art has died as well, for Rubek, in his bitterness at the loss of Irene, can sculpt only the faces of animals behind the masks of wealthy men who come...
...mainspring of the play's action is provided by the return of Irene. Shadowed by an ever-vigilant nun who is part fury, part mad-house attendant, Irene drifts back into Rubek's life with ghostly grace. Now art and life play out their conflict in the best fin de siecle fashion: while Rubek and Irene seek to regain both life and the past in a belated union, Maja flees to the arms of Rubek's counterbalance--the blustering bear hunter Squire Ulfhej...
...life is the enemy of art, then death must be its comrade. In the last acts Ibsen moves his characters to a health resort in the mountains--a look forward to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain where on a peak high above the "real" world, Rubek and Irene are swept away in the mist and snow of a sudden storm. From below, in the bourgeois flatland, resounds the simple voice of Maja in a childish freedom song which is both mocking...
...CURRENT PRODUCTION the ending is unfortunately obscured by the way in which lights have been substituted for the storm. Obviously meteorological effects are not easily duplicated in a small-scale production, but the stop-action tableau which poses Rubek and Irene facing each other tenderly while the lights flash and die is unnecessarily ambiguous. Their only possible reunion should be clear: cold death on the great heights...
...character of Rubek is simply too archetypal, too close to Ibsen himself, to be acted fully. Michael Brewer approaches the role with a partially appropriate tone which is at once bored, petulant and bitter, but too often seems to slide into a monotone which is more the actor's than the role's. Rubek's wife Maja (Karen Ross) comes on like a little girl who wants to play house, but can find no playmate in her cynical husband. He has tried to buy and enjoy the ideal domesticity she embodies, but it is only life and cannot satisfy...