Theater: Bleak House

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN by Henrik Ibsen

This play may carry a jinx. Each the infrequent attempts to stage it in the U.S. in the past quarter-century has proved monumentally inert, and the present production at Broadway’s Circle in the Square is no exception. Borkman is a wintry drama, a sort of autopsy blanched ruined lives.

The hero, played by E.G. Marshall, was once the head of a great bank. He embezzled funds in a desperate move to protect his depositors, was caught out and spent five years in prison. For the past eight years he has paced an upper room in his bleak house, unspoken to by his wife Gunhild (Rosemary Murphy) as he broods over past wounds and dreams an illusory comeback.

The bank is not all that John Gabriel has destroyed. He jilted the only woman he loved, Gunhild’s twin sister Ella Rentheim (Irene Worth) in order to climb the ladder of success. Dying of an unnamed malady, Ella returns to claim the Borkman’s son Erhart (Freddie Lehne), whom she had reared during Borkman’s disgrace. Gunhild wants him to redress the family honor. In a bitter confrontation scene, the two sisters drink from the cup oof the past as if it were vitriol on ice.

Erhart has a more intoxicating idea, like eloping with a pert divorcee (Patricia Cray Lloyd). The desolate John Gabriel wanders out into the snow to die, and the sisters clasp hands of reconciliation over his body. Marshall, Murphy and Worth do the best that able professionals can with their roles but this production rarely gives them much scope.

— -T.E.K.