DARK BEFORE THE DAWN
To emerge with any redemptive sense from Joe Hill-Gibbins’ spare, scorching rather brilliant production, it helps to remember that Henrik Ibsen, after laying out the destructive hypocrisies of late 19c small-town Nordic world, ends it as Mrs Alving sobs over her soon-dying son and a rising dawn, a fine day, with sun rising on the snowy peaks. In Richard Eyre’s version a while back – like this one stripped to a solid 90-minute intensity – that dawn was expressed in a brilliant lighting moment: there was a sense of a century’s end, a chance of dawn soon sweeping away those dark damaging moralities . There was comfort there, and this time I almost prayed that in the fully candlelit Wanamaker there would be a sudden flinging open of shutters, so desperate is the sense by then of the need for it. A prophecy of the modern liberation suggested in the book which Mrs Alving shocks her pastor by owning.
But in winter SE1 such a flooding of consoling light would hardly work. So the director and players may simply take this reflection as a compliment to the depth of feeling they provoked. They really did.
It is important always to keep, in this play, the strength and shock which got it banned by the Lord Chamberlain and excoriated as “deplorable and loathsome” in its stripping back of all decorous veiling from the topics of hereditary syphilis, euthanasia, potential incest and defiance of ‘any law, including God’s.” It uses light and darkness as a running theme, beautifully used here as we begin with Sarah Slimani’s Regine lighting one by one the candelabras which rise and descend (the whole backdrop is a big mirror, which is odd but does spread the light a little as well as spookily reflecting the players).
In the light she kindles – the light that finally flame by flame will die at the despairing end – we see Greg Hicks as the girl’s father – always a powerful, threatening actor – trying to get her to come and work at his proposed “sailors’ home”, ie. brothel, on the mainland. We see then Hattie Morahan conversing with Paul Hilton’s Pastor Manders about the orphanage she has funded in her husband’s memory, with a gradual exasperated revelation of what a libertine drunkard he was, her woman’s strength having held it and his reputation together in bitter secrety. Her son and only joy, Stuart Thompson’s Osvald joins them; his fondness for Regine gradually more appalling as we learn that she is is half-sister, begotten of rape by the dead Captain Alving.
Layer upon layer of hypocrisy, lies, emotional cruelty and deceit and hidden, lethal sins intensify; Manders’ plea for “the older truths” ever more hollow, with an actual guffaw, a frisson around me in the seats , at his attempt to belittle the rape of Regine’s mother with “I don’t condone it of course but he was playing with her…”. Even Osvald’s own perception that “love doesn’t always follow your rules” is soured by his brief, panicking conviction that his free life in Paris may have contributed as much to his decline as his father’s libertinism.
It’s all there: Ibsen’sscorching moral horror, his brilliant outrage at the way women suffered, hid and excused for the sake of Manders’ “old truths” and social cohesion. Morahan, Hicks and Hilton are all the more brilliantly effective for being so dimly seen; the increasing physicality of Helene Alving’s despair and desperation for her son in the gloaming strikes the heart all the harder. There is nothing restrained or polite or ‘period” about any of it. It simply devastates.
box office shakespearesglobe.com to 28 Jan
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