The Ibsen Festival (review)

The Ibsen Festival is the brainchild of the distinguished Norwegian director Stein Winge, who founded it in 1990 during his tenure as Artistic Director of Norway's National Theatre. Held annually for the first three years, becoming biennial in 1992,the Festival features both Norwegian productions—chiefly, but not wholly, of the National Theatre—and an array of foreign ones. The glory of the Festival is twofold: the opportunity to see and hear Ibsen produced in his native land and in his native tongue, and to see and hear him as he is filtered through the lenses of other cultures and languages. Ibsen productions have come to the Festival from China, Israel, Pakistan, Mali, Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Russia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Greece, and the United States (whose sole Festival presence was in 1998 with Gint, Romulus Linney's brilliant American version of Peer Gynt).

The 2000 Festival was a lean year for foreign companies; the only non-Scandinavian presence was Burkina Faso's Quagadougou Theatre's Enemy of the People, played uncut in Terje Sinding's French translation and set in a West African tribal village. The overly long performance by amateurish actors contained no new insights, but it proved once again that Enemy fits any clime. But if there was only one non-Scandinavian company, there was nevertheless an important international presence in the Festival in the production that was its high point, the National Theatre's new Little Eyolf. The least known of Ibsen's major prose plays, Little Eyolf, long considered a problematic text, is not often performed. The National Theatre deserves thanks both for producing the play, using its own very fine actors, and for inviting a brilliant Hungarian team to work with them; director Gábor Zsámbéki, former Artistic Director of Hungary's National Theatre and one of Europe's best known directors, and Zsámbéki's collaborators, set designer Csörsz Khell and costume designer Györgyi Szakács, created an extraordinary theatrical experience.

The National's Amphi Stage, a 200-seat state-of-the art theatre located at the top of the building, where it was ingeniously carved out of what used to be the worst seats in the Main Stage theatre, was a fine venue for the six-character play. The audience sat on one side of the playing space, where Khell had constructed a striking minimalist set: a raised platform on which stood two sloping black steel ramps with handrails, resembling footbridges, one at back stage left, reaching toward center stage, the other at front stage right, leading off stage.

The force of Zsámbéki's direction lay in its careful simplicity. Ibsen's action seemed to unroll as a flow of necessity in an unhurried, uninterrupted hour and forty minutes before a house in which you could have heard the proverbial pin.There was a notable and laudable lack of histrionics either in Gørild Mauseth's acting of Rita's consuming jealousy or in Mads Ousdal's acting of Alfred's consuming guilt. But there was no understatement, either; Mauseth and Ousdal gave a fine lesson in the feigning of naturally expressed emotion. Their realistic acting beautifully fitted that of the extraordinary Paul Emanuel Jæger in the title role. Speaking forthrightly in his small boy's voice, without a trace of self-pity, and with no indication of having memorized his lines, ten-year-old Jæger seemed Ibsen's Little Eyolf come to life, like one of Pirandello's six characters leaping from the author's book to the stage. Wearing his little soldier's jacket and a large, ugly steel brace on his right leg, thumping his way down the left ramp with his heavy wooden crutch, the boy actor's entrance was one of those rare, breathless moments of theatrical perfection, a triumph of the collaboration among director, set designer, and costume designer.

The straightforwardness...