Theatre

Rosmersholm
Until Jul 5
- New
This event has finished
Almeida Theatre, Almeida St, N1 1TA
Rating:
By Caroline McGinn

Posted: Tue May 27
A melodramatic love triangle between aristocrat Rosmer, his dead wife Beata, and his dead wife’s companion, Rebecca? Or flawed idealists, fighting rearguard actions against their tragic personal histories and the destructive political contraries of the present? Director Anthony Page opts for this latter, better, and infinitely more moving interpretation of Ibsen’s 1886 play. And it’s the living who form the real love triangle, with Paul Hilton’s slender and mild Rosmer becoming a battleground for his conservative brother-in-law, Dr Kroll, and the progressive but damaged Rebecca, who fights a desperate by-election for his soul.

Helen McCrory’s Rebecca is energetic, frank, sexy and rational. And Malcolm Sinclair’s Dr Kroll is too thoughtful and regretful to be dismissed as a stiff-necked old caricature, even though his politics are a risible anachronism for a contemporary audience. As Rebecca and Rosmer struggle to break free from the centuries of tradition and oppression that Kroll defends with increasing authority, you see how their shining ideals are inexorably eclipsed by their darker selves.

The climax here is not Rosmer and Rebecca’s death, which, in such a sanely realised production comes as almost as much of a shock to the audience as it does to their housekeeper. Instead, it’s the third-act showdown, where Kroll unearths more than he expected in his probing attack on Rebecca’s past (famously diagnosed by Freud as incestuous). Kroll’s deep shock and unspoken compassion, revealed by Sinclair, humanise both his attack on, and Rebecca’s pitiless defence of the future.

Page’s interpretation refuses to sacrifice even minor characters to pure villainy or symbolism. Like the central three, Paul Moriarty’s drunken, Nietzchean old tramp and Peter Sullivan’s cynical populist newspaper editor break out in moments of wildly inappropriate charm, showing how close they all are to sympathy with each other, even as the forces which have formed them drive them apart.