The first London reviews of The Lady of the Sea have just been published.
Dave Hollander from THE STAGE called the show “A mesmeric performance. Beautifully conceived bilingual update of Ibsen’s drama about loss and longing, with a mesmeric central performance.”
Tom Wicker from TIME OUT said “The Norwegians show us how Ibsen ought to be done with this powerful bilingual revival.“
“The cast are superb and work as a finely tuned machine.”Cindy Marcolina from BROADWAY WORLD.
On Oslo’s Victoria Terrasse there’s a white door marked 108. Behind it was once an office in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but before that, late in the 19th century, these rooms were occupied by a figure who has done more for Norway’s reputation abroad than all of its foreign ministers put together.
This was the apartment of Henrik Ibsen, generally regarded as the second-greatest playwright ever, and the second most-performed dramatist in the world. In both these criteria he is bested only by Shakespeare.
Ibsen’s living quarters have now become a significant venue in his thriving theatrical afterlife. For a week in January, two of Norway’s leading classical actors – Kåre Conradi and Pia Tjelta – were rehearsing here with a cast of Norwegian and UK-based actors for a bilingual production of Ibsen’s 1888 play The Lady from the Sea, which premieres this week in London.
Little Eyolf review – exhilarating Ibsen from Norway’s National Theatre
“It is the fashion these days to strip Ibsen to the bone. This exhilarating production from Norway’s National Theatre – played in Norwegian with surtitles – is very much in the modern mode. It runs, like Richard Eyre’s 2015 Almeida version, for a brisk 85 minutes, and is played in modern dress with mostly bare feet and minimal furniture. It leaves you, as all good Ibsen should, quietly shattered.
Guilt is the prevailing theme as Rita and Alfred Allmers try to repair a marriage already haunted by the accident that happened to their boy, Eyolf, when they were preoccupied in making love. What is especially striking about Sofia Jupither’s production is its realisation of Ibsen’s sexual candour. Pia Tjelta’s Rita can hardly keep her hands off Kåre Conradi’s withdrawn Alfred as he returns from a six-week walking tour in the mountains and unbuttons his shirt with frenzy. Alfred’s passion for his half-sister, Asta, is more decorously expressed but no less intense. The most shocking revelation comes when we learn that Alfred, who used to call Asta “Little Eyolf”, cried out that name at a moment of orgasm with his wife. Written in 1894, the play emerges as both breathtakingly honest and the ancestor of soul-baring modern dramas by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.
Jupither’s production also brings out Ibsen’s grim humour. When Tjelta’s superb Rita, a Lady Macbeth of the fjords, announces that she intends to devote herself to looking after neglected children, one’s initial response is that the police should be alerted. Conradi captures perfectly Alfred’s self-regarding intellectualism, and there is fine support from Ine Jansen as an anguished Asta and from Andrine Sæther, who turns the symbolic figure of the Rat-Wife, sensing something troublesome gnawing away in the house, into a hippy Pied Piper. This is Ibsen with the gloves off, and the only sadness is that the production was given a bare three-night run. Someone should invite this company back to give us an extended Ibsen season.”
**** Michael Billington, The Guardian (20 April 2018)
Artistic Director Kåre Conradi just won The Hedda Award 2016 (Norway’s equivalent to Olivier Award) for best actor in the part of Richard III at The National Theatre of Norway.
