Steve_Bamlett_blog

Rosmerholm Duke of York’s Theatre Seen 03/05/2019

This wonderful play shimmers with all the lights and darks of great theatre – wonderfully adapted text, brilliant direction and staging from design to lighting to on-stage-proxemics. You also wonder – how will they do the flood? Answer: here brilliantly!

And the acting is tremendous. Tom Burke looks as if he has never smiled or laughed, the very soul of Rosmer’s and Rosmerholm’s seriousness and Hayley Atwood plays Rebecca West as if she had ingested every great Ibsen female role and wanted all of them to play at once. A performance of great power shows the dark heart of reaction by Giles Terera. Peter Wight plays Brendel as if he were a socialist Falstaff: ‘hours debating right and wrong, – all this talk, and no action. Our future leaders won’t be neutered by ideals.’ (119)

The adapted play is probably the greatest Ibsen play for me, not least because Rosmer is little less than impotent and self-contradictory desire made flesh:

I want my God back.

…

I want to feel like I’m being heard. Like I’m being guided.

…

I want to know what I’m supposed to do. (117)

Ibsen’s great male heroes are at the truest when they become vulnerable children again, yearning for certainties that they know not to exist. And the play’s find their true action in female pragmatism, unsullied by a historically male idealism that wants self-belief but contains no action to get there. In this play people look at Rebecca and actually say that:, like Kroll (but Rosmer echoes it later too):

I don’t know what I’m looking at. (106)

I think the truth is that this is a great play because this speaks for its publics. None of us, sat there tautly in expectation, really truly and certainly know what they are looking at in looking at Rebecca West. Her greatness, like Hedda Gabler’s, is far greater than any psychology interpretation (or symbolisation) of it and has to do with the forces beyond mere personal motivations. Here Ibsen stands with Nietzsche. 

The day after seeing this play I saw Vuillard’s programme for Rosmerholm in the Munch exhibition and Munch’s later programmes and set designs for The Enemy of the People. These great artists knew that they were facing an artistic expression that exposed the failure of bourgeois political and sexual optimism and looked underneath and behind these traditions, almost, as it were, in the unconscious to find it.

This is the best play on in London at the moment. The National Theatre’s Small World seen the next day seemed shallow in its hopes, unable to face the horrors of racism and the violence its solution might necessitate, favouring something softer and less challenging intellectually and in action, despite some equally great performances to those in Rosmerholm. Great writers are that for a reason I think:

Are you following me?

She looks into his eyes

Or am I
following you? (128)