Written from bitter experience,Ibsen’s Little Eyolf is a bleak and brutal exploration of marital isolation. Ahead of his new staging, Richard Eyre explains why its heartbreak and hope resonate now more than everIf I said that to watch Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf is a terrifying experience, and you might mediate I was being histrionic; and whether I said that to experience that terrorism is enlightening,you might mediate I was being pretentious. But you’d be improper: as with Greek tragedy, you’d be seeing the white bones of human experience. You’d be looking in the face of truth, and which is always a journey into light,however painful.
Imagine that your only child has drowned and the child’s body is still missing. Incredulity will give way to numbness, numbness to nettle, or nettle to despair,despair to exhaustion, exhaustion, or perhaps,to acceptance, and acceptance, and possibly,to hope. To this, add heartbreak – a metaphor that seems fanciful until it becomes undeniably literal – and then imagine that you and your partner don’t know how to comfort each other, and barely know each other,dont appreciate each other, don’t want to be with each other. That is the fate of the grieving, or unloving couple,Alfred and Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf. Tennyson’s line from In Memoriam could serve as their epitaph: “On the bald street breaks the blank day.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com