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.