DIE FRAU VOM MEER
Deutsches Theater, Berlin
  Opened 26 November, 2014
**

The Lady From The Sea goes against the grain of Ibsen’s other female-protagonist dramas. Faced with a choice between remaining in a circumscribed life and leaving for either an adventurous future or the resumption of a glorious past, Susanne Wolff’s Ellida resolves to stay on where she is, precisely because this time the freedom to choose is real and significant. Stephan Kimmig’s Deutsches Theater revival renders this conclusion incomprehensible by making Ellida’s husband Wangel so febrile, manipulative and outright violent that Lord knows how he even managed to make a first marriage, never mind a second to someone like her. Pretty much everyone else is now like this as well, but nevertheless, when Wangel (Steven Scharf) is less robust and well-adjusted than the delusionary invalid Lyngstrand, something is probably wrong.

When I say the ending of Kimmig’s version is incomprehensible, I mean it literally. My German is more than adequate, but I simply could not tell what Ellida’s final decision was meant to be. This is partly due to inaudibility: Kimmig makes precious little use of the forestage between the two proscenium arches of the DT’s main house, leaving actors compromised both vocally and emotionally, by putting them behind not just an imaginary fourth wall but also a fifth… and in some scenes with a glass-walled box set, a sixth. They become both physically and psychologically distanced from us.

Most of all, though, he makes Ellida’s dilemma ultimately meaningless by having Scharf play both her husband and the dangerous but alluring seaman from her past who suddenly turns up to reclaim her. This obviously makes the climactic triangular confrontation impossible to stage, but it is surely intended to symbolise that the crucial choice is no real choice at all, that Ellida faces exactly the same oppression and disillusionment, only with either a cardigan or a woolly hat. If you want your Ibsen to say this, there are other of his plays that actually do say it; why not do one of them instead of going to all the trouble of engineering a factitious non-choice that by this point we don’t care about anyway?
     
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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