The Wild Duck

Synopsis

A happy family is thrown into disarray by the arrival of an idealist, in Ibsen's 1884 drama. Should the truth be pursued, whatever the cost? The idealistic son of a wealthy businessman seeks to expose his father's duplicity and to free his childhood friend from the lies on which his happy home life is based.

Our Review:

14 December 2005

How fascinating to catch this new Donmar Warehouse production of The Wild Duck (1884) so soon after another thrilling Ibsen revival, of his Pillars of the Community (1877), at the National. Ibsen himself considered The Wild Duck his masterpiece, a play that marked a major departure for him as a dramatist. And yet, there are distinct parallels between it and his earlier work.

Hakon Werle (played here by a gruff William Gaunt), the moneyed merchant in The Wild Duck, could well be Pillars’ greedy Karsten Bernick (a fiery Damian Lewis at the NT) a few decades on: tired, lonely and largely defeated as he nears the end of his life. Also as in Pillars, the arrival of a prodigal relative (in this case, his son Gregers) heralds major disruptions. But, beyond an Act 1 confrontation between father and son, Werle senior has little to fear. Gregers chooses instead to visit his lofty i...

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Latest User Review

195.93.21.99) - 1 February 2006:

Faultless performance. Almost all the individual characters are perfectly rendered, and the set and lighting truly evoke the sense of cold in a wintry Norway against which the chill of the false relationships is set. I don't believe this is Ibsen's finest play, and much prefer A Doll's House, but I can't imagine a finer reading or staging of The Wild Duck. It deserves a longer run, of course, but possibly transferring it to a larger theatre will lose the immediacy and the impact....

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