The Lady From the Sea

Published Wednesday 12 March 2008 at 15:05 by Richard Edmonds

In George Furth’s mid-eighties play Precious Sons, a 14-year-old boy has dreams of becoming an actor. “Of all the things there are,” he says, “a stage play is far and away the most wonderful thing.” And when you have a production as dazzling as Lucy Bailey’s The Lady From the Sea, there seems nothing for it but to concur wholeheartedly with Furth’s young thespian.

For here is the heart of theatre, showing us so poignantly the despair and occasional joys of Ibsen’s thwarted characters, marooned within unfilled hopes and corrosive despairs but, in this case, linked inextricably to the sea, which ebbs and flows through the neighbouring fjord and is part of their collective unconscious.

The sea operates within the unconscious moods of Ellida Wangel, a woman from a sea-girt island, who is played by the excellent Claire Price. It is an almost unplayable part, which will doubtless slow down and deepen as the current season moves along.

Unable to accept the tyranny of a formal marriage to Dr Wangel (his second marriage, with mildly resentful daughters from his first), Ellida has retreated into mental isolation, haunted by another lover whose spectre is a recurring horror, and we can remember that troll-haunted forests and shape-changing seal women were part of Scandinavia’s folk legends.

At one point in this very fine evening, Ellida and Wangel stand in silence, immobile, unable to communicate, at opposite ends of a long room lined with bleached planks. Here, Bailey evokes similar interiors created in stasis by the 19th-century Scandinavian artist Vilhelm Hammershoi. It is a memorable stage moment amongst so many in this wonderful evening. In fact, when the men cease elongating final vowels and get their hands out of their pockets, there may be even more.

I shall long remember Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s charming artist Lyngstrand, cursed with advanced tuberculosis, and crippled with exhaustion, lying helplessly in Mike Britton’s extraordinary flower-encrusted fore-stage, while others stand hopefully watching a new dawn in which lies Ellida’s redeemed life with Wangel. Seconds earlier, the Stranger - her nemesis, and Ibsen’s metaphor for the trolls which haunt us all, had returned to his departing ship. Once again, you sit on the edge of your seat forgetting everything around you. Quite astonishing.