Amid the Ruins of World Culture
Sometimes it seems that world culture must have ended during our lifetimes and that what what we’re now watching is people lost amid the ruins. Witness “The Lady from the Sea”, at the Bridge Theatre (until 8 November). This is a play written and directed by Simon Stone “after Ibsen” - “after” in the sense that the Black Death was “after” the Roman Empire.
This “Lady from the Sea” is tough for those of us who have known Ibsen’s play to be a peak experience in live performance. In 1979, “The Lady from the Sea” was the play in which Vanessa Redgrave, as Ellida Wangel, gave what I long regarded as the greatest live performance I had seen in theatre, with the late Terence Stamp as the Stranger. Ibsen’s 1888 play was seen to be what it is: an infinitely subtle and poetic study of the psychosexual condition of a woman, Ellida, torn between the husband she knows and loves and the stranger from her past who blocks her willpower. Only when her husband gives her freedom to choose does she finds that he, rather than the Stranger, is her choice. In 2003, the same play was still very much alive when the Almeida Theatre reopened with Vanessa’s daughter Natasha Richardson playing Ellida Wangel (the cast included the young Benedict Cumberbatch) in Trevor Nunn’s production. I’ve also seen other, lesser productions - but ones in which this was still evidently a brilliant and living play.
There’s a whole family of Romantic dramas - including Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid”, Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, Dvořák’s “Rusalka” - in which women and water are vitally if mysteriously linked. Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” belongs to that family. As Ellida goes through scenes with both the men in her life, Ibsen anticipates the work of Sigmund Freud. Apart from establishing the importance of a woman’s freedom to choose, he establishes the sea itself as a powerful but wonderfully ambiguous symbol, elementally important as long as Ellida cannot resolve the conflicts in her own mind.
Not so at the Bridge. Sure, Stone’s characters have the same names as Ibsen’s Norwegian originals - but they talk about iPhones and Spotify and going to Manchester. And they use the words “fuck”, “motherfucker”, “cunt” and “arsehole” far more often than Ibsen’s characters talk about the sea.
As Ellida, Alicia Vikander’s Ellida is a vividly prosaic character who shouts a lot and has full control of her own will from the start: she even turns out to have killed a man in the past (this is where Stone’s writing is at its most inept). At the end, she leaves her husband - which happens to be how Ibsen ended his earlier classic play, “A Doll’s House”, but is the opposite of how he ended this play. Peggy Ramsey, the legendary agent for many British playwrights, liked to say that dramatists should study “Ibsen, Ibsen, and Ibsen”. Stone, however, knows better. For him, Ibsen needs to be shouted, strewn with obscenities, and rewritten out of recognition. No thanks.
“The Lady from the Sea” had its premiere in 1888, the same year as “Creditors”, by the younger playwright August Strindberg. Like Ibsen, Strindberg was digging into the roots of male-female relationships: he includes disturbing elements of malice and misogyny that can make his plays even now both fascinating, painful, and raw. Fortunately for us, “Creditors” - which he recognised as the most mature play he had yet written in his prolific career - is alive and well at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, in an exemplary, seemingly simple, production directed by Tom Littler (running until October 11).
Charles Dance, Geraldine James, and Nicholas Farrell are the three stars here, giving organic performances that develop as we watch. These three are forever linked to the great 1984 TV series of “The Jewel in the Crown”- but who guessed in 1984 that Dance would become a haunting conveyor of malice? Who knew the versatility that James would keep revealing? Or the open-hearted vulnerability with which Farrell keeps making himself surprising? Littler never imposes on Strindberg: he lets the power play between the characters evolve suspensefully.
The Almeida Theatre is showing (until October 11) something named “Romans, a novel”, by Alice Birch, which turns out to be a clumsy collage of several unalike scenes that might work better if they belonged to several separate novels and/or plays. It’s about three very different but very English twentieth-century brothers (“Roman” is their surname), all of whom were damaged by parenting and by boarding school, and at least two of whom become examples of what’s now labelled toxic masculinity. Sam Pritchard directs: it’s not his fault that the play falls apart into separate elements as you watch, though I wish he had staged it without amplification - the Almeida is, after all; an intimate space. As the three brothers, the actors Kyle Soller, Oliver Johnstone, and Stuart Thompson all take their characters on large arcs throughout the production (which lasts almost three hours). Thanks to Birch’s writing, however, “Romans” is less than half-baked. It’s another production that seems to have been composed after the end of world culture, in this case because of its sheer incoherence.
At the Wigmore Hall on Monday 15, the German baritone Benjamin Appl gave a recital with the accordionist Martynas Levickis, with songs that range ranging chronologically from Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma through to Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Appl is easy on the eye and strong on charm; his voice is as handsome as his looks but less capable of laughter. Now in his early forties, he was the last student of the great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose style can still be heard in Appl’s vocalism. But Fischer-Dieskau was always a strong mind: an evening of his singing was as much for the intellect as for the ear: Appl just doesn’t have the vocal variety or intellectual toughness to engross our attention throughout an evening. We kept hearing the same pianissimi (not all of them secure), the same agreeable vocal tone. Here was another evening that seemed to have been assembled after the end of world culture, with Appl toying sweetly and harmlessly with songs in three languages like a tour guide.
Last year, London City Ballet - a company that had closed decades before - was re-launched under the enterprising artistic direction of Christopher Marney. This year, it’s back and it’s better, with an honest-to-goodness commitment to its repertory and a flair for showing the particular stylistic features of works by four dissimilar choreographers. Its prima is now Alina Cojocaru, who has been one of the world’s finest ballerinas since 1999 (she was an important principal of the Royal Ballet for more than twelve years). Its other dancers are from a range of backgrounds, but what matters is the intelligent vitality with which they work together.
One of the four works this company presented, at the end of last week at Sadler’s Wells, was George Balanchine’s “Haieff Divertimento” (1947), never seen in the U.K. until now. Although I’ve seen this previously danced by two American companies that specialise in Balanchine, London City drew me into details of footwork, structure, spacing, partnering that made me admire it even more. It’s a witty piece, sometimes using both hands and feet with strangely wry detachment.
Another new London City acquisition is Alexei Ratmansky’s strange and wonderful “Pictures at an Exhibition” (2014), using Mussorgsky’s great score for solo piano, played live. What you see is a dance that seems connected to a visual deconstruction of Kandinsky’s abstract painting “Color Study: Squares With Concentric Circles”, but Ratmansky, it’s known, made each movement of his ballet in response to the original Viktor Hartmann painting that inspired Mussorgsky in 1874. This makes Ratmansky sound too intellectual for comfort, and yet that’s not how his ballet works. Simply, this dance for ten people has its own spontaneously changing inner life, very satisfying married to each part of the score and building with the music into a complex whole. Though I’ve watched it often since its world premiere, it feels both innocent and inexhaustible.
The other two items on the programme matter much less, but one of them is by the late Liam Scarlett, a young British choreographer who was widely cancelled in 2020, a year before he committed suicide. London City’s staging of his “Consolations and Liebestraum” (Liszt) shows Scarlett for what he was, an expressively immature but precociously skilled choreographer who might have become an important artist in other conditions. (If only an artistic director had asked him to make a work without all that partnering - or had made him study “Haieff Divertimento”.) Just by putting this British choreographer’s work back onstage - cancelling his cancellation - London City Ballet has relaxed the British dance climate. London City Ballet’s next London season (five performances) is on November 19-22 at the Linbury Studio Theatre: the programme will include Ratmansky’s “Pictures” but three other work, one of them a rarity (“Quiet City”) by Jerome Robbins. In just a short space of time, London City Ballet has become one of Britain’s few valuable dance companies.
@Alastair Macaulay 2025