Rosmersholm

Synopsis

Beate Rosmer committed suicide in the millrace at Rosmersholm. After suffering deep depression and growing insanity her death seemed, at the time, almost inevitable. In a battle of wills, Beate's ghost is strangely brought back again by those who knew her. The memory of the dead woman and her suicide opens up old wounds and dark secrets that propel the lives at Rosmersholm towards a dramatic finale.

Our Review:

23 May 2008

It is a mark of the endless fascination of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm that even as the characters move towards the truth of things, so the atmosphere becomes cloudier with fear and apprehension. What exactly are the white horses on the horizon? Why are Rosmer, the newly widowed former priest, and Rebecca West, his housekeeper, drawn towards the abyss?

Anthony Page’s production of Mike Poulton’s new version has a quiet, hypnotic power but is deficient in one crucial respect: Paul Hilton as Rosmer and Helen McCrory as Rebecca, while playing with a scrubbed and fearsome integrity, do not, in Bernard Shaw’s phrase, “sustain the deep black flood of feeling from the first moment to the last.”

The psychological crisis is perpetrated by several factors: Rosmer, the last of a great dynasty in the community whose wife Beata has committed suicide in the rushing waters of the mill race, is converting to revolutionary socialism; Rebecca may have caused the suicide by...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 2 July 2008:

Below average Ibsen - both in terms of play and production. There isn't enough meat for 180 mins and on a hot summer Tuesday, it lost me 30 mins before it finished. The usually wonderful Malcolm Sinclair veres into the sort of mannered acting Ibsen specifically didn't want and Paul Hilton's characterisation just wasn't believable. ...

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