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In the key roles, Douglas Campbell and Janet Amos somewhat lack the highly charged authority that their parts call for. Undershaft should be as formidable as a Caesar in mufti; Campbell is more like the amiable president of a swank country club. The way in which Amos' Barbara fishes for human souls is energetic but rather like a Girl Scout trying to land a cookie order. Kneebone makes a winningly ebullient Cusins, but it is easier to picture him running into a cannon than running the cannon works. What still runs, exuberantly after 73 years, is the play.
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen exists here, but only as prints may be discovered in the snow without the palpable presence of a living being.
This is a wintry tale of three blasted lives ruined years before the play begins. It is a kind of autopsy performed on the emotional lives of John Gabriel Borkman (Douglas Campbell), his wife Gunhild (Frances Hyland) and her twin sister, Ella Rentheim (Kate Reid), whom John Gabriel once loved but left to further his vaulting ambitions. He "wanted to wake all the slumbering spirits of the gold." But not out of a personal mania for making money. As he says of the great steamers out on the fjord: "They make this whole round earth into one community. They spread light and warmth into human hearts in countless thousands of homes.
That's the thing I dreamed of doing."
The dream became a nightmare. The great bank Borkman heads plunges into default on overextended credits, ruining many investors. After five years in jail, he has had eight more years of self-imposed exile, pacing an upstairs room "like a caged wolf." The embittered Gunhild will not speak to him. But Ella forces a confrontation. She is dying, and she wants the Borkman son, Erhart (Hayward Morse), whom she raised as a boy, to take her name, just as Gunhild furiously wants the son to clear hers. The sisters settle old scores with each other and with Borkman. Ella accuses him of killing her ability to love, though in Reid's portrayal she is tender and valiant.
Yet another woman, Mrs. Fanny Wil ton (Diana Barrington), has won the son's heart. Fanny, seven years Erhart's senior, could be a model for the gay divorcee.
She is fun to be with and knows when to take her fun even if it might not last. As she leaves the dour house with Erhart, John Gabriel, in true Ibsenite fashion, goes out into the snow to die as the two sisters clasp hands in reconciliation. In the title role, Campbell possesses the flinty dignity of granite. But the play was quarried out decades ago.