John Gabriel Borkman

Published Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 12:05 by Aleks Sierz

Ibsen’s penultimate play, written in 1896, shows the last day in the life of John Gabriel Borkman, a disgraced banker who, since his release from prison following a sentence for fraud, lives in almost solitary confinement in an upstairs room. Below, his wife Gunhild is visited by her sister Ella, who has brought up the Borkmans’ son, Erhart. But while the two sisters have different plans for him, he has a mind of his own.

The snow falling behind the windows of Peter McKintosh’s evocatively gloomy set immediately alerts us to the frostiness of this tale of a tycoon whose megalomania has shattered the lives of all around him. And it’s hard to warm to a play that offers so little redemption. That said, this new version by David Eldridge goes some way to humanising Ibsen’s text, which is full of abstract big ideas about “life” and “mission”.

Ian McDiarmid plays the lonely colossus Borkman like a caged beast, always ready to pounce and give his visitors a good tongue-lashing. His powerful stillness suggests the icy heart and psychological depths of the man, although he also has a tendency to be querulous when you’d expect the character to be ballsy.

Deborah Findlay’s Gunhild and Penelope Wilton’s Ella tread a convincing path between repressed passion and boiling anger. In the second half, Findlay seems to be literally shouldering defeat while Wilton’s ravaged looks clearly portend Ella’s death. Rafe Spall plays the life-loving Erhart, and the other main roles are taken by Lolita Chakrabarti and David Burke. Directed with his customary clarity by Michael Grandage, this is an unforgettably atmospheric production of a chilly classic.