Ibsen
The Lady from the Sea, Print Room at the Coronet review - freedom to choose?Monday, 18 February 2019
Ellida (Pia Tjelta) has a choice to make, the outcome of which will bind her future to her past or her present, each represented by a man. On the one hand, there is the tempestuous seafaring Stranger (Øystein Røger) to whom, long ago and in a fit of... Read more... |
The Wild Duck, Almeida Theatre review - meta, merciless and altogether brilliantThursday, 25 October 2018
Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the... Read more... |
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensembleThursday, 19 October 2017
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what... Read more... |
Nikki Amuka-Bird interview: 'There’s huge enthusiasm among actors of colour'Tuesday, 10 October 2017
Nikki Amuka-Bird spent the summer in Antigua, swimming and scuba diving and could have claimed to be working. She is playing Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Donmar, in a version directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah transposed to the Caribbean... Read more... |
Hedda Gabler, National TheatreTuesday, 13 December 2016
Theatre conventions are a funny thing. Today, it’s actually quite difficult to see a modern classic dressed in the clothes and performed on the set of its specific historical period. It has to be in contemporary dress. And in a contemporary setting... Read more... |
The Master Builder, Old VicThursday, 04 February 2016
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so... Read more... |
Little Eyolf, Almeida TheatreFriday, 27 November 2015
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Oslo: Two Peer Gynts and a HamletMonday, 08 December 2014
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a... Read more... |
My Old LadySaturday, 22 November 2014
An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz,... Read more... |
The Wild Duck, Belvoir Sydney, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 25 October 2014
Ibsen cast a cruel eye on the characters of his most relentlessly symbolic play – wild ducks wounded or domesticated by fate or character. They speak or behave unsympathetically, for the most part, yet the actors must make us care for them. Simon... Read more... |
Peer Gynt, Théâtre National de Nice, Barbican TheatreSaturday, 11 October 2014
Like Ibsen’s titanic character in search of a self, the Barbican’s theatre programme globetrots to find the richest and rarest. Yet it certainly doesn’t reach Peer Gynt's conclusion that home's best. In this case London’s finest and, for most of the... Read more... |
Ghosts, Almeida TheatreFriday, 04 October 2013
In a moment of scalding intensity at the climax of Ghosts, terrified Oswald sees the sun. Throughout the rest of Ibsen’s celebrated drama about the sins of the past, light is fairly absent. Merely cataloguing the disasters that befall its heroine... Read more... |
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