Losing the wild duck
Peter Jenkins
The Wild Duck (Olivier) The National Theatre's production of Ibsen's first great masterpiece largely mis ses the point which is the wild duck. This maimed bird in the attic of the Ekdals' studio is the symbolic fulcrum of the whole play. It is both a general symbol and a symbol of specific significance in relation to each of the major characters. In general it is the symbol of urban man's longing for a lost wilderness and that gives the play, unlike Ibsen's dated earlier work, a thoroughly contemporary air in which Arthur Garfunkel's line 'I'd rather be a tree than a street' would scarcely jar. The wild duck, of course, is Hedvig's wild duck, and when called upon to sacrifice it for love of her father, she kills herself; but at the same time, the image of the winged bird diving to the bottom of the sea and clinging there to the weeds and the kelp is a metaphor for man's despairing soul and the ease with which his will can be destroyed. Old Ekdal, Hjalmar, and Gina have each of them been winged by Haken Werle, the wealthy timber merchant, who it was who shot Hedvig's duck. As for Gregers Werle, he is the game dog who intends to retrieve his old friend Hjalmar from the moral depths.
This elaborate symbolic framework is constructed around a simple and yet immensely powerful theatrical image, a bird which we never see. Christopher Morahan's production is virtually doomed to failure by the set which Ralph Koltai has designed for it. Here is how Ibsen described the moment when Ekdal, father and son, slide open the double doors in Act 2 of the play: 'There appears a large, wide irregularshaped garret, with recesses and a couple of uncased straggling chimneys. Bright moonlight falls upon parts of the room from the skylight while other,parts are in shadow.'
Ibsen plainly intends this to be a crucial, dramatic moment. The image is of another world behind the doors, a make-believe forest large enough for hunting; instead we see the kind of cubby-hole in which council tenants proverbially keep rabbits. The vast space afforded by the Olivier Theatre is wasted prodigiously by Koltai who cramps his drab little set — Scandinavian mod-sauna — onto a platform (quite unsuitable for a play which is still realistic in manner) and then distracts our attention with a forest backdrop and, for reasons unknown, a magnified tree. He thereby demotes Ibsen's multi-meaning symbol to an ungainly cubby-hole and promotes his own image of the forest which is only one of the significances of the wild duck and which, in any case, is well enough depicted in the imagery of the language. Ibsen himself attached importance to the lighting as a means of setting the different atmosphere of each act but he cannot have had in mind the nordic gloom into which David Hersey plunges the greater part of the action. Where is the studio skylight through which the sun comes streaming in Act 3? The inappropriateness of the set and the poor lighting made it difficult for the play to come together in the way it should and must, building up through dialectical intensity to a truly tragic, and not merely melodramatic, climax. But the fault also lay with the performances, which seemed to be taking place within a theatrical vacuum rather than within the dramatic wholeness of the play. Ibsen, again, gave advice on this point, which was that Hjalmar should not be played as a mere buffoon or Gregers as simply spiteful. It has been often suggested that the two of them are alter egos, perhaps even the two sides of Ibsen himself, and certainly they need, like Othello and lago, to become locked in an overpowering dialectical intimacy. Instead, from Stephen Moore and Michael Bryant, we are given distinctive but separate performances.
Playwrights are not necessarily reliable guides to the characters of their creation but of Hjalmar Ekdal Ibsen wrote that he must 'not be acted with any trace of parody .. . His sentimentality is honest, his melancholy, in its way, attractive; no hint of affectation.' Moore avoids parody but, with the seriousness of a good farceur, which he happens to be, his performance is too comic throughout and therefore, at the end, where Ibsen makes masterly use of comedy to give point to the tragic climax of the play, insufficiently tragic. We never feel of this Hjalmar that he could have been the hero of Gregers's youth; he is too shruggingly ineffectual and wet, too easy a prey for Gregers, and thus much of the dramatic tension between the two is lost.
Bryant, as Gregers, avoids mere spite but gives an all-black performance. There is nothing in it to suggest self-parody by Ibsen, or even self-satire. Shaw cast him as a 'busybody' but this Gregers is much worse than that, he is a physical and moral runt, an ideological psychopath (there are suggestions in the text of both diabolism and hereditary insanity) who, if he were around today, would be an apostle of, say, the Church of Scientology. In the first of the two crucial scenes with Hedvig in which he tempts the child to self-destruction, or at least to kill the duck, Bryant makes us feel that Gregers is no longer in control of the fatal words that he is uttering; literally possessed. It is an interesting reading of the part but unfortunately it sets Gregers apart from the play and drains it of much of its fierce human intensity.
The saving performance of the production comes from Eva Griffith as Hedvig. Only when she was at. the centre of the action did it have me sitting forward in my seat. Ralph Richardson as Old Ekdal was Old Ralph giving one of those I-ama-cameo performances which are permitted of grand old senior citizens of the theatre. Basil Henson as Relling, the doctor and moral pragmatist, a key role in the play, provided some badly needed ballast to a production which seemed to have neither direction nor purpose.
There are problems in modernising Ibsen. It may be that he is for the moment both too near and too far from us. I find it easier to enter his universe by way of the heavy Victorian ante-room of his period. Yet Christopher Hampton's translation, which is conversationally relaxed whilst philosophically precise, gives new life to the moral argument at the heart of the play. It is then for the director, like the gun dog of Ibsen's metaphor, to plunge to the dark depths of the play and retrieve the wild duck in all its meanings. This is the failure of the National Theatre's production.
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