The Enchantment

Synopsis

One sunny day in Paris, Gustave Alland, famous artist and philanderer, visits Louise Strindberg - convalescing in her brother’s studio - and casts her effortlessly under his spell. In a vain attempt to escape, she exiles herself to her provincial hometown in Sweden. But a letter propels her back to Paris and into his arms. And for a brief moment, before the horror, ecstasy is hers.

Our Review:

2 August 2007

In a recent article, Germaine Greer placed the Swedish novelist and playwright Victoria Benedictsson on a roll call of woman artist suicides from Eleanor Marx and Dora Carrington to Diane Arbus and Sarah Kane. It’s a mortifying list, but it’s hard to deduce any common grounds for the tragedies beyond a sense of self-loathing.

Yet in the case of Benedictsson, who killed herself in 1888 shortly after completing this play, we are somehow invited to conclude that she was driven to the grave by a scandalous love affair with the Danish libertarian critic George Brandes. Ibsen and Strindberg were friends of Brandes, and it’s likely that Benedictsson’s story infused Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie, both written within two years of her death.

In her play, the heroine Louise Strandberg (Nancy Carroll) is not an artist, not even a woman of any political or social passion. She is simply eaten alive with mixed feelings of sensuality, anxiety and regret over her affair...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 18 October 2007:

No wonder the Scandinavians have such a high suicide rate if this is what they grow up with. The Enchantment makes Ibsen and Strindberg look like Ray Cooney farces and could only have been written by a woman with a very limited and unhappy experience of love. The Cottesloe production is not heped by being staged in the round leaving large proportions of the audience staring at the back of an actor's head for most of each scene. The acting is uniformly excellent even from those with very small roles and there is a masterclass in scene stealing from Judith Coke bringing some welcome levity to the unremitting doom....

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