It is rare, but you know it when it happens.
It is almost chemical and intuitive. Something comes together to give you such a strong reading of the play that it seems folly to try and see it again.
This time, it happened opposite my home in Holland Park, with Henrik Ibsen at the beautiful Coronet Theatre in London.
The play in question was The Wild Duck, directed by Alan Lucien Øyen. The Norwegian Ibsen Company and Den National Scene, Bergen, brought it to the city.
The Ibsen Company, founded by the actor Kare Conradi, perform Ibsen and Strindberg in their original languages on the London stage. This was the seventh production of their work at the Coronet.
There is something unique about seeing a play in a language one does not understand or indeed has any familiarity with.
I remember the first time I saw Chekhov in Russian performed by a Russian theatre company at London’s Barbican. It was a revelation and a shock.
We British often claim the playwright as one of our own, who, if you scratch the surface, you’ll discover was born in Tenby, not Taganrog.
We have a definite way of staging his work: high drama, beautiful interiors and endless samovars for the strong black tea both countries love.
For the Russians, Chekhov’s plays are about comedy and almost farce.
Yes, the misery and the desperate to forget the day-to-day are there. But there is something comic about Uncle Vanya and Nina when they speak Russian rather than English.
After seeing the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg perform Uncle Vanya in London, we quickly claimed that director Lev Dodin was responsible for the humour, as we knew that our beloved Chekhov did not do comedy.
Our Russian friends had to point out how wrong we were.
Our belief that Ibsen must have come from Skegness rather than Skien resurfaces and then is shattered.
We want our Ibsen heroines to be the picture of Alice-like innocence like Hedwig in The Wild Duck or full of fear and despair like Hedda Gabler.
But this is not the real Ibsen – it is Ibsen seen through a British lens.
Henrik Ibsen was born into a considerably more straightforward society than his British contemporaries.
Yes, his life spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century; he was energised by the 1848 revolutions with all their roots in romantic nationalism. Hearing Ibsen in Dano-Norwegian gives his work resonance and power.
However, at heart, he is interested in domestic conflicts, in tangled family homes and personal tragedies.
As Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary c’est moi”. Hedda Gabler is Ibsen in skirts, but so is Hedvig Ekdal Ekdal in The Wild Duck, written in 1884.
Ibsen’s favourite sibling was his sister Hedvig Ekdal who was considerably younger than him and the only member of his family which he always kept in touch with.
Yet Hedvig Ekdal and her brother Ole were followers of the revivalist preacher Gustav Adolph Lammers, which was a point of conflict for Hendrik.
Also, there is the young man who grew up in a home split apart by financial ruin and who, at 14 years old, had to leave his family to earn his living as a chemist’s assistant in the appropriately named Grimstad.
In that small town, Ibsen fathered an illegitimate child with the maid of the house but never fully recognised his paternity.
Like Gregers, Ibsen only returned once to his family home in Skien. Like the Old Werle, he gave some financial support to his illegitimate son, but he never met him.
The play parallels his often turbulent and troubled life: a rebel who only wanted to be left alone to write.
The Wild Duck belongs to the fourth and final period of his work, focussed on the dark interior of the human soul.
Ibsen believed ideals are only for the few and most of us need illusions to live. In this final quartet of plays, Ibsen floats the idea of the life lie. The lies we tell each other in order to be able to go on with our humdrum existence.
Ibsen considered The Wild Duck to be his finest play. He tackles the Coriolanus myth – that truth is not always the best option.
Why tell your maiden aunt that her Easter bonnet looks like something worn by a scarecrow or your elderly uncle that his tank top went out of style before you were born? What does it achieve?
Of course, Ibsen is playing with much higher stakes. But the principle is the same. Truth is a slippery customer.
A tranquil life can be based on what he calls a life-lie and be perfectly fine. To explode that life-lie can result in dreadful consequences.
The Coronet stage was pretty bare except for a collection of simple black dining chairs and a small table. At the back of the stage were two sliding pine doors to the loft where the wild duck of the title was kept.
The costumes were simple and could be from any time period. The only theatrical item of clothing was the shabby military greatcoat worn by Old Ekdal.
The pared-down aesthetic ensures that nothing interferes with the words screened on all three stage walls. One soon gets used to reading them and seeing the actors simultaneously, and the experience is completely absorbing.
The play opens at Haakon Werle’s home, where he is holding a small party to welcome his son Gregers back after a long absence.
Hjalmar Ekdal is delighted that his old friend is back but is unaware that Haakon is charged with vengeance against his father, whom he felt condemned his mother to an early grave by having an affair with their former maid, Gina.
Ekdal is a photographer who is in the process of inventing something big that will change the modest fortune of his family.
He lives with his father and wife, the former maid Gina and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Hedvig Ekdal. It is a ramshackle home, full of tenderness and warmth.
After leaving prison for fraud, Old Ekdal is given piecemeal work by Werle and the family feels grateful for his kindness towards them.
Recently, Old Ekdal was given a wild duck that Werle accidentally shot due to his failing eyesight. The duck is doubly wounded—first by a gun and then by Werle’s hunting dog.
The family keeps it warm and safe in the loft. It becomes a precious possession for all of them, a symbol of their hope in themselves and a glittering future.
Against Gina’s wishes, Gregers moves into their rented room, and the calm of the house evaporates. Hjalmar Ekdal learns that his father went to jail for a crime the elder Werle committed and that Haakon’s generosity comes from guilt.
On a long walk, Gregers tells him that his wife Gina had been his father’s mistress and that, in all likelihood, Hedwig was probably his child, mainly because, like his father, she has poor eyesight.
The fragile life-lie is destroyed. In a heated argument with Gina she confesses that she cannot be sure who is Hedvig Ekdal’s father. Hjalmar leaves the house in a temper and cannot bear to see his daughter again.
The next time he sees Hedwig, she is dead. Gregers told her that if she sacrificed her wild duck as proof of love to her father, he would return.
Either because of her poor eyesight or because she feels that life is no longer worth living, Hedvig Ekdal turns the gun on herself.
Gregers congratulates himself on the fact despite the tragedy Hjalmar Ekdal has achieved gravitas in his suffering.
The first production I saw of the play was a television version with Jenny Agutter as Hedvig Ekdal. I was not even a teenager. I watched it because I loved Agutter’s performance as Roberta in The Railway Children. As an eldest child, I hoped I was a bit like her.
The BBC production was, of course, deeply sentimental and a bit like Little House on the Fjord. How strange to think that I saw that television version only 200 metres from the theatre where I saw the Norwegian version last week. Two such different readings of the same play.
There was no sentiment in the Coronet play and no Nesbit Victorian schoolgirls with red flannel petticoats. Yet the overwhelming conclusion for me was just like Nesbit how brilliant Ibsen was at portraying women.
Ibsen’s women make sure that everything runs smoothly and that life with or without the life-lie is lived.
Gina, played by the luminous Yvonne Oyen, keeps her home despite the feckless and selfish behaviour of Hjalmar Ekdal, played by Kare Conradi, a man who never had to own up to anything. He is weak, selfish and a dreamer.
We get the measure of the man when he returns from the party at the Werles and has forgotten the treats he promised Hedvig Ekdal. She is disappointed, but he soon turns her disappointment into his own as the two women who are constantly making demands of him.
It is a crucial moment early on in the play as we learn how hard Hedvig Ekdal and Gina must work to keep Hjalmar stable and content. Hermine Svortevik Oen, as Hedvig, is far removed from Jenny Agutter.
Oen is a convincing child who has had to be an adult to her father all her life. She knows but does not want to know just how flawed her father is, but she also desperately wants to live her own life-lie.
Both mother and daughter grow in stature as the men around them crumble into themselves.
The other woman on stage is Mrs Sorby, who is played by Line Verndal. She is about to be married to Old Werle and says that she has told him everything about her past so that there would be no surprises.
Mrs Sorby has kept Hjalmar Ekdal’s family going as much as her own, and her look of withering contempt for Hjalmar is something to behold.
There are moments in the play that took my breath away. The demonic look on Greger’s face when he was persuading Hedvig Ekdal to kill the much-loved wild duck as the ultimate sacrifice for her father was dazzling.
Suddenly, Christian Rubeck, who played the younger Werle, became the most frightening and insane man in West London.
His desperate persuasion and conviction that he was avenging his mother by making this little family live in the bright glare of his truth was terrifying.
Hedvig Ekdal was smart enough to question his convictions but sad and young enough to accept his suggestion. Again, the child trying to understand the adult was an exceptional moment of dignity and love.
There was also the moment Gina understood that her husband knew everything and that their home was shattered. She stood very still, and a tear glistened in her left eye. Restrained and yet totally devastated.
I have not seen finer acting since their last performance on the same stage. For that reason, I am not sure I will ever see The Wild Duck again.
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Photograph courtesy of Tristram Kenton. All rights reserved.
