Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 19 Number 2/3 August/December 2018
(Final Issue)
___________________________________________________________________
Ibsen’s Imagery: A Cypriot Premiere
by
The Lady from the Sea(1888) is one of Henrik Ibsen’s most controversial plays. Given its Cyprus premiere this season at the State Theatre (THOC) in Nicosia, has never been popular, and it’s easy to see why. The setting is familiar: a small-town, bourgeois household hemmed in by the Norwegian fjords; a doting and asphyxiating husband; and a younger, restless wife tempted by a wild freedom. A Doll’s House redux, in short – except that, unlike Nora Helmer, the heroine who walks out the door to inaugurate the modern theater and modern feminism, Ellida Wangel “chooses comfort, domesticity, surrogate motherhood and the superannuated embraces of her lawful spouse”, as one spectator in a discussion wonders. The director’s comment to this ideological squabble: ”I can tell which way the wind is blowing” (phone interview, 12. February 2018)
THOC’s recent production owes its life to a collaboration with Heinz-Uwe Haus. Haus is well known to the Cyprus theatre scene since he re-opened in 1975 after the Turkish invasion the National Theatre with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. His memorable productions in Cyprus and Greece are a legend for the new generation of theatre makers and its audience. It is Haus’ Brechtian approach to Ibsen’s mindset, which enacts the “use value” of the story. Haus searches for the poetical fragments and popular roots of the author’s imagination. There is for example a lesser-known counterpart to the mermaid in Scandinavian lore, the havmand or merman, a creature who, unable to mate with his own kind, is forced to reproduce by seducing human females – a demon lover whose seed is both life and death. The mysterious Stranger who bewitches Ellida – a sailor who, by credible rumor, has murdered a former captain (rebellion against the social order, overthrow of the patriarchal male) – is obviously meant to evoke the havmand.
The Stranger’s return precipitates the play’s crisis. Ellida effectively finishes off Wangel by telling him she has never cared for him, and she demands that he gave her her “freedom” to choose the Stranger, without telling him whether she will actually exercise it. Director and Dramaturg Haus enjoys to lay bare the contradictions of the events and to challenge the contemporary implications.
The plot is complicated by the presence of Wangel’s two daughters by a previous marriage: the nubile but passive Bolette, whose former tutor, Arnholm, returns to seek her hand, and the younger but precocious Hilde, who becomes the object of attention for Lyngstrand, a tubercular, would-be artist who is simultaneously one of the most pathetic and most repellent characters in the Ibsen canon. These stories entwine with the major one, providing both enrichment and ironic counterpoint. Arnholm, a rejected former suitor of Ellida herself, seeks polite revenge by transferring his affections to her stepdaughter, while Lyngstrand, after asking Bolette to remain devoted to him while he goes south to seek his health and fortune, suggests to Hilde that she will reap the bounty of his affections in the end because Bolette herself will be too old when he returns.
Part of the tension in The Lady from the Sea comes from its unresolved combination of realistic and symbolic elements. The Stranger obviously represents the lure of sexual freedom, but life as a seaman’s whore (the practical reality) is hardly a credible alternative to Wangel’s household. Ellida has no real choice, as the play’s denouement reveals, and the Stranger’s sinister mythic resonance suggests the pitfalls of a liberated sexuality. It might thus be concluded that both Ellida and Bolette succumb to the realities of patriarchal dominion in the end.
It’s equally arguable, however, that they have succeeded in renegotiating the terms of bourgeois matrimony to their advantage. Ellida brings Wangel to heel, and Bolette compels Arnholm to make so many concessions that she might be seen as a Nora in the making.
In outline, Ibsen’s play is rather like a mix of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Ellida, married to a kindly provincial doctor and stepmother to his two children, dreams of the sea and an enigmatic stranger to whom she feels spiritually bound. When the stranger arrives to lay claim to her, she is forced to make a lasting choice. But the real test lies with her husband, Dr. Wangel. Will he, in a reversal of Torvald Helmer in A Doll’s House, redefine the nature of marriage by acknowledging her right to choose?
Wangel is undergoing a moral transformation, his daughter Bolette is selling herself in marriage to her ageing ex-tutor. If Ellida can look forward to a future based on freedom, Bolette faces one based on antique notions of female dependence: something sections of the audience seemed to find strangely amusing.
But it is Stella Fyrogeni’s performance that motors the production. She starts with the great asset of possessing the tall beauty of a Northern Greek. My only cavil is that she initially equates restlessness with insecurity, seems only partially imprisoned by her fantasies and misses some of the ecstatic yearning behind lines such as, in envisioning a ship on the open sea, “Just imagine being on board.” But she is totally transfixing in the later scenes when she embraces the holy ideal of free will and rejoices in the responsibility that comes from choice. The less she does physically, the more powerful she becomes emotionally.
There is in every aspect much to enjoy in the production. Dinos Liras as Wangel has exactly the right air of perplexed decency, Stiliana Ioannou invests his daughter Hilde with a destructive mischief that prefigures her later appearance in The Master Builder and Nektarios Theodorou is highly impressive as the young, mortally sick and deeply chauvinist sculptor with whom she capriciously toys. Elena Hadjiafxendi interprets the older daughter Bolette with a wide scale of contradictory attitudes. Neoclis Neocleous as her former tutor is a congenial partner. Both’ physical expressiveness visualize the social gestus of their relation in a true “Brechtian” manner. Asteris Peltekis as Stranger creates a nearly mythical figure. An unexpected importance for the story telling and the basic re-reading of the play becomes the painter Ballestedt in Neofytos Neofytou’s performance. His view on the events and his gist as surviver of social challenges gives access to the poetical depths of Ibsen’s humanistic concerns. (He could play Brecht’s Galileo with Schweykian dialectic!) Haus succeeds beautifully with his inventive ensemble work. A piece of parachute silk as large as the stage floor, is used during the acts by the actors for interludes, creating visual images and emotional context of the lure of the sea (movement: Panayiotis Tofi).The ‘sister arts’ – music, light, stage, costumes, movement – serve as a team of narrators. The goal of this most actor’s oriented performance I have seen for a long time, is “to allow a theatre making inspired by the emotional memory of the audience”, as Haus told in a recent interview.(phone interview, ibid) Ciuli, Mnouchkine, Besson, Koun come to mind. Lakis Genethli’s design, with its wide Craigean space and cyclorama, also admirably conveys the atmosphere of the Norwegian fjords. The wonderful period costumes by Stefanos Athienitis provide the appropriate distance to the time of the events. Michalis Christodoulides shapes the sound and music masterfully to the performance idea. No opportunity to see this extraordinary play should be missed, because such questions are far from easy, for they imply a (re)thinking of certain basic relationships and categories, perhaps a locating of landmarks and charts as well. But this already seems to imply that one knows where one is going, which is something less than self-evident. In any case, to get “there” or thereabout things to be combined and articulated, avoiding hierarchization and subordination.