The Sunday Times, January 19, 2003

The sea in her soul

IT HAS BEEN a long time since we in Malta have had an Ibsen production. This is a pity, for it means that many of our drama students as well as most of our theatregoing public, simply do not know the work in performance of one of the greatest masters of the theatre.

Stage directors are often put off by the cumbersome translations mostly available in the past, but now there are recent ones in a contemporary idiom such as Peter Watt's version of THE LADY FROM THE SEA (St James Cavalier) being presented by Actinghouse Productions as their second production.

Frank Hoerner, who directs, has given the play a 20th century setting. The women's costumes are the long- skirted ones fashionable off and on during the past 40 years or so, and the music that the characters play on a primitive kind of jukebox is the kind of pop music we have had to bear with for decades, though doubtless the experts would be able to pinpoint it to a particular decade or two.

The text has been edited fairly heavily, I think. One character, a minor one who is not however unimportant, has been edited out, and Ibsen's ending has been changed significantly, while the direction of the short but crucial role of the Stranger clearly goes against Ibsen's intentions.

There are other changes, some of them meant to diminish the elements of old-fashioned melodrama of which Ibsen never completely got rid, but the main effect of the changes is to make this play even closer than it was intended to be to the dramatist's more famous A Doll's House. Hoerner makes it speak more closely to today's women - not that many of them still need it - atom the sacredness of their right and indeed their duty to decide the way in which they live.

In this play men are seen as manipulators. A man like Dr Wangel, the husband of the protagonist, Ellida, uses his genuine love to compel her not to leave him, while the Stranger, in this production at least, is seen as a stage-manager who sets an entire mise-en-scene, coupled with the strong sexual attraction he knows he has for Ellida, to satisfy his vanity by trying to make her leave Wangel.

Another male character, Arnholm, manages to persuade the much younger Boletta, Wangel's elder daughter by his first marriage, to marry him by offering her a life of what she sees as freedom from the drudgery of housekeeping for her father. Arnholm is a decent man, but his wealth enables him to overcome the girl's reluctance to marry someone who could have been her father.

Ibsen may have been a pioneer of realism in the theatre, but he was also a poet, and the fascination of The Lady from the Sea lies in the stage poetry created by its symbolism and its setting. Ellida's father was a lighthouse keeper, and the sea is in her blood and calls to her to leave her home in a little town by a Norwegian fjord. This bond with the sea was made tighter when a seaman with whom she fell in love had placed her ring and his on a key-chain and thrown them into the sea, thus wedding them both to it, before fleeing Norway after having killed his captain.

Ellida's love for the seaman has disappeared for some years, but her promise to wait for him remains in her heart, even after having married Wangel, a widower with two daughters, and borne him a son whose eyes changed colour like the sea but who died when still an infant. Though she has not had news of the seaman for years, the birth of her son triggers off a strange fear of the man, and when early in the play the strange (and consumptive) sculptor Lyngstrand tells her of a meeting on a ship with a sailor her intuition tells her this was her old lover.

In the script this is one of the least convincing episodes, so Hoerner makes it more palatable by hinting very broadly that Lyngstrand is being used by the seaman to invent a scenario that will prepare Ellida for the seaman's return. When the seaman, called The Stranger in the play, eventually turns up, his effect on Ellida is astonishing. Hoerner changes the mesmerising influence he has, indicated in the script, into a strongly erotic one.

Ellida may no longer love the Stranger but she greatly desires him. She is not even deterred from showing this desire by her husband's presence and this is one point where I felt the direction failed. Wangel may be old and kindly, but he is no complaisant cuckold, not a man one would expect to let his wife couple shamelessly before his eyes. Indeed, in a scene inserted by Hoerner in which Lyngstrand dances sexily with Ellida, Wangel comes in and knocks Lyngstrand down.

The play's core is formed by the need for women, married or not, to decide in perfect freedom how they want to live their own lives. When the Stranger comes to fetch Ellida away so she will live with him, it is only when the heartbroken Wangel tells her she is free to choose that she feels free of the Stranger's lure and bids him go away, as he does.

Ibsen's play ends with Ellida choosing to live contentedly with Wangel and Hilde, his younger daughter, having renounced both the Stranger and the sea. In this production the ending is ambiguous. The Stranger has left, but Ellida ignores Wangel's joyful invitation to celebrate. Wangel leaves crestfallen, while Ellida remains, suit case in hand, staring out at the audience. She may have given up the Stranger, but has she given up the sea to which she has been eternally wedded, Stranger or no Stranger? The lights are dipped, and each of us is left to answer the question.

Adrian Mamo's set consists of an apron stage, strewn with withered leaves, an alcove with a swing, standing for the house's veranda, an upper area standing for a hilly prospect, and two white screens, one on each side of the stage, that occasionally become transparent to show characters before an entrance and, in one case at least, an offstage event of some importance.

The trouble is that if, as it happened to me, you are sitting in the seats at either of the two sides of the apron stage, your sight-lines at times are very bad and you are apt to miss what appears on the screen on your side. Moreover you have to strain to look up at what is happening in the area a few metres above your head.

The only people with a comfortable view of the show must have been those right in front of the stage. By now Hoerner must have realised that in directing the play he thought much too little of the audience at the sides, and his set designer should accept the fact that only minimal sets will do for this theatre.

The play's mingling of realistic action with symbolism and the occasional dash of melodrama makes it difficult to find the right style. The intimacy of the theatre at St James Cavalier certainly makes it essential to cling to realism in most details, and to allow the other elements to intervene at particular instances.

This last Hoerner does well by making, for instance, the Stranger, appear on his own in the upper stage and make conjuror-like passes with his hands, indicating his role as a manipulator of events. In this part, Lino Mintoff does not appear to the audience as sinister as Ellida sees him, but he has the self-assurance of a man whose determination is great as is his acceptance of ultimate defeat.

Again, the music of the jukebox, and the dancing often associated with it, brings out the emotions of joy, confusion or ecstasy dominant at particular moments. What was missing was some indication of the fjord and the navigation on it, Ellida's constant reminders of the life she has lost - we never heard the siren the ship that brought and took away the Stranger.

As Ellida, a magnificent role ranking with Ibsen's best, Irene Christ achieves a fusion of realism and what I can only call expressionism. Clad for most of the production in a shimmering dress evocative of the sea, she clearly does not belong to this society, if not to this world. A stranger in her own home and to her very husband, she seems at times to be in a trance, waking up only to greet joyfully and sensually a man from her past, Arnholm, or to speak passionately of her fears and sorrow to Wangel whom she seems to love from the other lip of an intervening chasm.

Speaking of the sea she voices the fascination as well as the terror it makes her feel, and when the Stranger does appear he horrifies her, but the horror is that which many associate with a sexuality that overleaps all borders. Again and again she hints she is not entirely normal, as in moments of fury when her cries take on an animal-like ugliness and fearfulness. Performers at St James Cavalier should note, however, that fortissimo should be used very sparingly indeed in that small space.

At the end, Ellida's straight and solitary figure provides a memorable symbol of women prepared to take full responsibility for the way they are going to live. Nora's slamming door at the close of A Doll's House may be more evocative, but the apprehensive woman with her suit case must remain imprinted in the breast of many a theatregoer who sees this production.

Godwin Scerri is a strongly delineated Wangel. He is kindly and courteous, his deep love for Ellida enabling him to bear with her strangeness and her refusal to sleep with him. As he feels her slipping away from him farther and farther, he takes to drink - a directorial touch and not in the script - and he is not far from collapse until the second visit by the Stranger enables Wangel to rediscover his dignity and to make the greatest gesture of his love, that of offering Ellida the freedom to leave him. Scerri's performance is full of light and shade both in the voice and in body language. This is a performance ranking with his peak in the Eighties.

Jes Camilleri's Arnholm is vain, but his vanity is not of the irritating kind, merely of the type that keeps men attractive when they are past their prime. Moreover, it is a vanity that has its limits, as he generously shows when Boletta at first laughs off his marriage proposal. One feels that even if she marries him for his ability to take her away from home, he will be a good husband to her. Like Scerri's, his voice control is excellent and every phrase hits its mark.

Faye Cachia Zanimit (Boletta) and Hilde (Francesca Fenech) are the voices of emerging youth, clever and perceptive, sometimes teasing. Cachia Zammit's scene with Lyngstrand in which she quizzes him ironically on his views about marriage is amusing and her scenes with Arnholm hints at emotions lurking below the surface, but both she and Francesca Fenech (a lively young performer) must work harder on facial expressions to match their speech, especially in an intimate production like this.

As Lyngstrand, Ben Stuart has the difficult task of playing Ibsen's idealistic but untalented artist (Ibsen detested idealists) who is pathetic because he is mortally ill and does not know it, but also to be censured because he is the Stranger's accomplice. Stuart's strong stage personality does not make up for his frequently unexpressive face and vocal tone.

The Lady from the Sea is being performed again tonight and also on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. If you have not seen it yet, try to do so.

Paul Xuereb

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