John Gabriel Borkman

Synopsis

Written in 1897 and one of the author's last plays. John Gabriel Borkman has been in voluntary seclusion in an upstairs room since serving a prison sentence for embezzlement. His estranged wife Gunhild, her twin sister Ella, his son Erhart, the divorcee Mrs Wilton and Borkman himself, are all trapped in a suffocating atmosphere of their household. There are only two ways out.

Our Review:

21 February 2007

There is something timeless and tumultuous about Ibsen’s tragic drama that finally evades Michael Grandage’s fascinating production, in a new version by David Eldridge (based on Charlotte Barslund’s literal translation), which is taken at a fair old lick and almost leaves you gasping for breath as old Borkman expires on his snowy mountaintop.

Borkman is a ruined financier who has spent five years in jail and now eight years prowling around upstairs, estranged from his wife, Gunhild. Her twin sister, Ella, his former lover, comes to visit, and so does his son, Erhart, who is planning a moonlit flit to happiness and “life, life, life,” with an older woman and a younger acolyte, the piano-playing Frida who happens to be the daughter of Borkman’s loyal old office clerk.

The network of dependency was stretched by Borkman’s fraud and deception, but shattered by his emotional criminality above all else. Ian McDiarmid looks more like a caged wolf than either Ralph Richardson ...

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Latest User Review

Job - 12 April 2007:

Michael Grandage's production is anchored by three pitch-perfect performances. McDiarmid's Borkman is a confused, deluded man rather than a caged monster, embittered by his eight-plus-eight years of imprisonment but too washed out to begin life again. After his only tenuous grasp on life (contact with the younger generation) is lost to him, his death scene not only makes sense but has the inevitability of Greek (or Shakespearean) tragedy. Suddenly I thought of King Lear, whereas with Scofield I got no further than Donald Wolfit. Penelope Wilton and Deborah Findley are outstanding. I shan't discuss them in detail here, but I thought they were the perfect catalysts of Borkman's demise. Grandage clearly remembers that Ibsen chose his plays' titles with great care, which is why the two women act like Regan and Goneril on the old man's psychological state. It's not all good news. I was seriously disappointed in practically all of the minor performances (good old David Burke excepted), and in the case of three younger players I felt I was watching poorly trained stage school graduands of moderate talent giving their anxious all to try and impress when they've heard an agent might be in....

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