Rosmersholm
Almeida
Love — The Musical
Lyric
Fat Pig
Trafalgar Studio
A Norwegian melodrama about suicide, socialism and thwarted sexual passion. If you saw that on the poster would you be tempted? Nor me. Add the authorship of Ibsen and you might change your mind but you’d be unwise. Rosmersholm is a clumsy, unengaging late play with ghastly characters and weird, wonky relationships. Rosmer, a former priest, shares his house with a blonde sex bomb Rebecca, who was the best friend of his mad wife who drowned herself in a pond. Instead of enjoying a summer of love, the priest and the blonde live a life of irritating and blameless chastity. Enter a bigoted prig with a fairytale baddie name, Dr Kroll, who invites Rosmer to join his right-wing alliance. Rejecting this, Rosmer announces his support for a gang of dangerous revolutionaries. Exit Kroll spitting nails. None of these characters is remotely appealing, although Rebecca seems decent enough. But when she turns out to have been less than frank about her friendship with the drowned wife, she and Rosmer pledge their love for each other and embark on a ludicrous and self-aggrandising act of atonement.
At his best Ibsen creates stories that roll out with an unforced realism pace but his narrative skill has deserted him here. The plot is driven by the contents of the dead wife’s writing-case and the poor woman evidently spent her declining days scribbling sensational accusations about the other characters. Fresh disclosures keep popping up to impel the story forwards and this clockwork trick deprives the play of naturalism.
This is a nice-looking production by Anthony Page (who used to direct Z-Cars, in case you were wondering) but it’s constantly hampered by Ibsen’s interfering puppetry.
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