BWW Reviews: John Gabriel Borkman

A bank manager is disgraced in a scandal, spends several years in jail, and then plots a return to glory. No, this isn't a review for the new Wall Street sequel.  It is the plot of Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, now playing at Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Featuring stage and screen heavyweights Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Lindsay Duncan, the new adaptation by Frank McGuinness renders the material only too relevant more than a century after it was written.

It has been eight years since businessman John Gabriel Borkman (Alan Rickman) was released from prison, after secretly speculating with his clients' money. Since then he has neither left the house nor spoken a word to his wife Gunhild (Fiona Shaw) who refers to him only as "the bank manager". Instead he seethes in an upstairs enclave rehashing the past and plotting to reclaim his capitalist destiny.

As the play unfolds we encounter further casualties of the bank manager's aspirations, many of whom carry emotional wounds deeper than any financial losses. There is Erhart (Marty Rea), Borkman's twenty-something son, on whose shoulders all of the family's hopes now rest, and Gunhild's twin sister Ella Rentheim, (played with chilly grace by Tony Award-winner Lindsay Duncan), the victim of an even more personal betrayal.  "You loved me more than life itself-" Ella says to Borkman in Act II. "But you would squander that for a bit more money. You are guilty of two murders. You are guilty of killing your own soul and mine."

Fiona Shaw is spot on in her interpretation of the long-suffering Gunhild. She tries to maintain an aura of calm but her mounting frustration soon bursts through in moments of tense physicality that have her clawing at couch cushions and unleashing tortured wails. She is perfectly pathetic, the very embodiment of a martyr figure trying to live through her child and failing miserably.

And is there any actor who makes villainy more alluring that Alan Rickman? His Borkman is surly, delusional, and self-centred but undeniably human and not without a touch of sadness; a cold-hearted fool capable of love only for his "gorgeous retinue of glory and power", and not people. Rickman is only too heartbreakingly believable in this conviction. And with that deliciously syrupy voice he could say almost anything and get away with it.

Set designer Tom Pye conveys Ibsen's Norwegian winter with frosty blue interiors and banks of snow that continuously encroach on the Borkman household. A beautifully rendered blizzard in the final act is an apt setting for this crop of characters so removed from familial warmth. When Erhart, the last character with a burning passion for life departs, winter truly settles in.

John Gabriel Borkman is the type of play one could watch several times just to fully grasp all its nuances. Also, a few lines get missed here and there -- the price of the un-mic'ed intimacy of Ireland National Theatre -- and the dialogue is so beautifully rendered as to bear repeating.

John Gabriel Borkman runs through 20th November at The Abbey Theatre as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. In January the production heads to New York City for a month-long engagement at BAM. Would that some of Wall Street's bank managers could attend and see the greed of our own era reflected back at them.

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