Theatre
Resurrected
Ted Whitehead
Pillars of the Community (Aldwych) The Belli of Hell (Garrick) John Barton approaches his production of lbsen's Pillars of the Community for the RSC with all the signs of a man who knows full well that the play has.not been done in London for fifty years and understands why, but is determined to have a go at resurrecting the monster.
It's a pity. In this play Ibsen pursues his theme of self-realisation and spiritual fulfill-bent, but in the form of prose naturalism — a form perfectly suited to the subversion of bourgeois standards from within. He takes the eighteenth-century convention of intrigue melodrama, retaining its tricks of misunderstandings and revelations and even the climactic use of a letter, but refines. the form to make the incidents of the drama plausible and even probable. And having got his audience to agree that his picture is lifelike, he forcefully demonstrates bow the most precious institutions of the bourgeoisie are basically devices for the acquisition and transmission of property: inheritance, for instance, is secured by marriage, and marriage is secured by myths of romantic love and fidelity, and these in turn by a universal policy of sex repression. He sets the play in a small Norwegian town dominated by Karsten Bernick, consul, shipbuilder and 'pillar of the community'. Bernick, together with several other pillars, is arranging an extremely profitable land deal. But his chance of clinphing it is threatened when his brother-in-law, Johann, returns from America after fifteen years and we learn that he has been carrying the can for certain sexual and financial misdemeanours actually committed by Bernick. (Hard to say which is the worse offence, passion or peculation, in this oneeyed community.) Johann wants his'name cleared in order to marry Bernick's Ward, Dina. Providence, it seems, intervenes when Johann decides to set sail in one of Bernick's ships which tile ship-owner knows to be unseaworthy. Bernick is so terrified al' exposure that he almost allows him to sail (o his death; instead, he repents and makes a public confession.
The play becomes a sate study of hypocrisy. But originally Ibsen had intended to write a controversial study of feminism and to demonstrate how in this kind of patriarchal set-up women are rendered pathetically dependent on men. The opening scene is a beautiful demonstration of female redundancy, as a group of wives and younger women sit knitting, gossiping and bitching, while their men conduct the serious business of life in another room. Later, we 'see Bernick treating his wife (whom he had married for cash) as a tiresome child. And we learn that his sister has spent her life • languishing for the exiled Johann. In fact the only woman who has come anywhere near self-realisation is Lona, who has shared johann's exile. In the wide spaces of the American prairies, it is suggested, men andwom.en can grow in a way that is impossible in the bourgeois prison.
Unfortunately Ibsen fatally weakens his thesis by parading before us a set of selves who have very little to realise anyway. Bernick's only real passion has been for property. And his one offence is that he has cheated in pursuing that passion. He is arraigngd by the standards of the society he rules. And when he finally confesses, and is restored to a state of grace, it is a distinctly bourgeois grace, signified by his decision to share out the loot a bit more equitably and (of course) to pay more attention to his Mrs. Ibsen the satyr is swallowed up by Ibsen the satirist. At the end Bernick says that women are the pillars of society, only to be corrected by Lona: 'No, the spirits of Truth and Freedom —.these are the pillars of society.' A ringing banality from the author of Brand' and Emperor and Galilean. In this first exploration of naturalism, Ibsen had not yet faund a way of transcending the limited consciousness of the characters he chose to attack.
The RSC production tries to pep up the play in several ways. It races through the rather laboured exposition, with the result that at the interval the audience are left scratching their heads and earnestly scrutinising the family tree printed on the programme. Who's who is crucial to a drama of revelation. And at the end it suggests that Bernick is a conscious hypocrite playing on the community's convent ional,moral responses. This gets a laugh in the theatre and, as I see it, undermines the play. The text, by Inga-Stina Ewbank, restores some provocative remarks about marriage from earlier drafts of the play,
which Ibsen had cut (wisely) from his final version. The set, by Michael Anals, gives us cane furnishings and plants hanging like giant spiders from the ceiling.
The performances are uneven. Ian McKellen's Bernick never convinced me that he thought of himself as a pillar of the community — he was altogether too nervous and sensitive, perhaps to prepare us for the cynical presentation of the final confession. Judi Dench brought the right gutsy directness to Lona, the lady from the prairies, but not the fleet mockery the part requires\ At the Garrick,. The Bells of Hell is a whimsical joke by John Mortimer at the expense of the liberal clergy. The devil, in the guise of a curate, returns to the parish of St Barnabas Without, in South London, arranges several fraudulent miracles involving loaves, fishes and wine, converts the trendies to a belief in that 'good old-time religion,' and vanishes in a puff of smoke. I tried not to think about the Moscow production of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita in which the return of the devil is the occasion for an all-out attack on rationalist and humanist philosophy. Mortimer has set out to write a farce, and his actors — Peter Woodthorpe, Tony Britton, Phyllida Law — try every trick they know to make it work. There are some amusing passages, best of all being Woodthorpe's solo dance to a rock record at the beginning, but overall it's. desperately thin in invention and relentlessly arch in tone: There was a young lady named Friggins. . .
Previous page
