Ibsen
The Wild Duck, The Norwegian Ibsen Company, Coronet Theatre review - slow burn, devastating climaxFriday, 25 October 2024
“I think this is all very strange,” declares 14-year-old Hedvig Ekdal at the end of The Wild Duck’s third act, just as everything is about to plunge into a terrifying vortex. Alan Lucien Øyen's’s production is pointedly strange from the start, a... Read more... |
An Enemy of the People, Duke of York's Theatre - performative and predictableWednesday, 21 February 2024
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in... Read more... |
Ghosts, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - a claustrophobic descent into purgatoryFriday, 24 November 2023
Henrik Ibsen may well have wanted to shake things up, to rile against the social mores of his time. But his visionary critiques didn’t usually come with anything as radical as, say, optimism. And there’s no more of a downer than Ghosts.... Read more... |
Ghosts, Abbey Theatre, Dublin review - creating tension from desolationWednesday, 10 May 2023
Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devastating attack on, among other things, the syphilitic sins of the fathers being visited on the hopeful young created a ruckus in the 1880s. It’s... Read more... |
A Doll's House, Part 2, Donmar Warehouse review - Noma Dumezweni nails itWednesday, 22 June 2022
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys... Read more... |
When We Dead Awaken, The Norwegian Ibsen Company, Coronet Theatre review - living death, dying lifeWednesday, 02 March 2022
In Ibsen's last and shortest play, further cut here, four people nominally climb a mountain, but actually seem to be crossing waste land towards the land of Samuel Beckett. It’s an amazing play in which reality is symbolic and symbols are real,... Read more... |
Theatre Lockdown Special 5: A solo show for the ages, Ibsen refreshed, and yet more frolicsome catsThursday, 14 May 2020
No one can accuse the gods of streaming of failing to cast a wide net. That's even more so with an array of streaming opportunities over the next week that ranges from Off West End Ibsen given a second chance to shine to an online encounter with,... Read more... |
Nora: A Doll's House, Young Vic review - Ibsen diced, sliced and reinvented with poetic precisionWednesday, 12 February 2020
Ibsen's Nora slammed the door on her infantilising marriage in 1879 but the sound of it has continued to reverberate down the years. In 2013, Carrie Cracknell directed Hattie Morahan in an award-winning performance at this theatre, last year Tanika... Read more... |
A Doll's House, Lyric Hammersmith review - Ibsen tellingly transposed to colonial IndiaThursday, 12 September 2019
Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking... Read more... |
Peter Gynt, National Theatre review - towering protagonist, middle-way productionThursday, 11 July 2019
Like Hamlet and both parts of Goethe's Faust, with which it shares the highest peak of poetic drama, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is very long, timeless enough to resonate in a contemporary setting and sufficiently ambiguous in its mythic treatment of the... Read more... |
Rosmersholm, Duke of York's Theatre review - little-known Ibsen lands with forceSaturday, 04 May 2019
The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds. The protean Sonia Friedman, this venture... Read more... |
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, British Museum review - compassion in the age of anxietyThursday, 11 April 2019
Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of... Read more... |
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