This
Judgement Day focuses on a sculptor named Arnold Rubek, not a cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gosh, imagine
Terminator 2 scripted by Henrik Ibsen... but no, this is Ibsen’s final play, dating from 1899 and usually known as
When We Dead Awaken.
It begins with the mutual discontent of Rubek and his young wife Maia
on a hotel terrace, and immediately we are in all too familiar Ibsenese
territory. Another unhappy couple. Another artist dissatisfied with the
majority of his work since he achieved success: Rubek in sculpture,
like Solness in architecture in
The Master Builder,
like Ibsen himself in playwriting. Another woman returning after years
apart to shake the artist to his core… although, where Hilde in
The Master Builder
had been all but forgotten by Solness and arrives to claim what she
considers her legacy, Irena in this play had been Rubek’s model and
muse for his masterpiece, considers herself to have been spiritually
killed by his abandonment of her and has returned in search of
retribution. Its inexorable approach is heralded by translator Mike
Poulton’s entitling his new version after Rubek’s great sculpture (
Judgement Day
was also Ibsen’s original title for the play); as doom comes down the
perilous mountainside, Rubek and Irena ascend to meet it, in the
deluded belief that they can thus reclaim their lives.
James
Dacre gives the play a taut studio production, staging it in traverse
in a slitted box of deep sky blue. Michael Pennington plays the aridity
and bitterness in Rubek without granting him excessive access to its
inner wellsprings; Penny Downie’s Irena displays a slight exotic accent
and a more than slight (but again not blatant) glint of madness and
despair in her eyes. Ibsen could usefully have paid more attention to
Maia and the atavistic Baron Ulfheim, whose dealings frustratingly only
begin to form a contrast with those of the central couple. Overall, I
cannot but feel that Poulton’s devotion to this play is immoderate. He
has fashioned a version that is at once sinewy and dreamlike, patterned
with motifs of petrification and scriptural temptation; however, Ibsen
here says nothing about the artist, his inspirations, acts and
relationships both perpetrated and forgone, that he had not already
said more than once. If those themes had a voice, they’d intone
Teutonically, “I’ll be back.”
Written for the Financial
Times.