Ghosts at BAM

“There’s no one to say I can’t resist temptation,” “he needs help, someone he can love and trust,” “a daughter’s duty is to her father,” “we don’t have a right to expect happiness,” “this has been a university of suffering for me,“ “you have no idea what this has cost me,” “who am I to judge you or to forgive you,” “I brought you into the world,” “I didn’t ask you for life.” These are all lines from Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts currently playing at BAM. The words are searingly delivered by Ibsen’s widow Helene Alving (Lesley Manville), her sickly son Oswald (Billy Howle), her servant Regina (Charlene McKenna), her pastor, (Will Keen) and her servant’s father Jacob Engstrand (Brain McCardle). Eyre who also directed gives them the haunting quality of a Greek chorus, reminding the audience of the inevitability and inescapability of fate. Tim Hatley’s design which uses a scrim to layer the action makes it possible to the see the ghosts, the apparitions of the past, in the present. Oswald, as we know, is suffering from syphilis, but penicillin is not the cure and neither is freedom from nineteenth century repression and loveless self-sacrifice. If we remember Oedipus did everything in the book to avoid his fate. If he had been less willful he never would have murdered his mother and married his father. Terminal illness of either a physical or spiritual nature is terrifying and there's a tendency to move from shock to blame. Hindsight is never 20/20 when it comes to mortality or the blank indifference of the universe and that's ultimately the tragedy Ibsen’s characters succumb to in the play’s current iteration at BAM. Eyre’s production doesn’t make you think; there’s no room. It's neither a good or bad thing. This Ghosts is simply too dark and true, but one almost wanted The Wooster Group, whose signature style lies in freeing language from narrative, to intervene. “The Sun, the Sun” are the famous last lines. Kierkegaard talks about the esthetic, ethical and religious stages and one wonders if the current production, however masterfully conceived, might have benefited from more artificial light.

A Doll’s House at BAM

What about that baby in Carrie Cracknell’s Young Vic production of A Doll’s House at BAM? You don’t see too many live babies on stage these days and this one was remarkably well behaved. However besides the baby, the production has much to commend it including Hattie Morahan in what can only be defined as a phenomenological interpretation of the character of Nora, to the extent that it doesn’t address her femininity or lack thereof, but the confines of her being. Actually the current production centers around both Morahan’s Nora and the family friend, Dr. Rank (Steve Toussaint). There are three key scenes in this regard. In the first Nora reveals her big secret to an old childhood crony, Kristine (Caroline Martin), a widow left with “not even grief for a sense of loss to nurture." For the sake of present happiness Nora's mortgaged her future. In plain terms she’s signed a fraudulent loan to accommodate a yearlong trip to Italy. Whether she's making a sacrifice for Torvald (Dominic Rowan) who has been ill or merely using his illness as an excuse is ambiguous. Supposedly it’s her husband who treats her like a child addressing her as his “hamster,” his “skylark,” his “humming bird,” his “most treasured possession,” but her actions are plainly impulsive and childish and a reflection of her own ability to quell her appetites. Ingmar Bergman’s production of A Doll’s House, which played at BAM a number of years ago emphasized the notion of self-realization. The Bergman Nora could have been a man as well as a woman. But the brilliance of this Nora is the way it’s influenced by Hedda Gabler, introducing the death instinct in its exploration of the feminine mystique. The two scenes exploring Rank’s being both occur with Nora. In the first he talks about life as fulfilling the need “to continue feeling tormented.” In the second he unveils another layer of the onion. He’s consumed with love and is critically ill. While Nora is lying, Rank is dying. These two leitmotifs say more about the play then the famous denouement when Nora walks out--which considering the modernity of the interpretations provided seems almost anticlimactic. Yes, Torvald’s narcissism and selfishness are revealed. Nora is just a piece of the puzzle. But so what? Is Nora any less directorial and narcissistic in her machinations. The revelation is almost Newtonian in a production that’s well situated in the world of relativity. The rotating set is like an old vinyl record revolving on a turntable and the feeling it creates is one of synchronicity. Rather than a succession of epiphanic moments, the varying scenes unfold complete and complex lives. The circularity is mirrored in Morahan’s rendition of the play’s famed tarantella which foreshadows her so-called liberation. The current A Doll’s House, with its emphasis on subjectivity and intention, is a brilliant and out of the box approach to the Ibsen classic.

The New Rijksmuseum

Could Rembrandt have painted the cast of power brokers in Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum Parts I and II which just finished a run at Film Forum? After all Rembrandt's great masterpiece, The Night Watch, with its portrayal of the movers and shakers of his day, is one of the museum's most precious possessions. Could Ortega y Gasset, the author of such essays as The Revolt of the Masses have dealt with strife between democracy and the higher calling of art that the film depicts? After all it’s the Dutch tradition of democracy that delays the implementation of an enlightened esthetic concept. “This kind of process in which nobody wants to take a risk is too Dutch for me,” is just one of the many expressions of exasperation that the film records. “It’s not democracy,” the Spanish architect declares about the Dutch Bicyclists Union which becomes a major opposition force. “It’s the perversion of democracy.” Actually the closest comparison to the tapestry which The New Rijksmuseum paints lies in the work of Ibsen. The movie is a kind of An Enemy of the People in reverse, with an visionary esthete fighting the town’s folk (in this case the town is Amsterdam) for change. The museum’s embattled director, Ronald de Leeuw, is also reminiscent of Ibsen’s Master Builder, Solness, in his Sisyphean struggle. In Part 1, we follow him as deals with a mounting list of extrinsic and intrinsic problems, one of which is a budget of 134,000,000 euros for a project whose initial construction cost is estimated over 100,000,000 euros higher. The museum was originally designed by Pierre Cuyper l895 and anyone who visited the earlier incarnation might simply ask why change an already magnificent structure? Why accommodate and attempt to contextualize twentieth century artworks in a repository for one of the greatest collections of the past?  For those who resist the notion of change the architects and the director are Robert Moses like figures, who are out to get their way, no matter what the material or human costs. The New Rijksmusem is about art and architecture, but it’s a great work of art itself, comprehensive, multivalent in its concerns and full of a memorable cast of characters, including its own watchman whose devotion to the museum and its renovation is one of the most moving aspects of the film. Rent this movie.

Codependent Yes More

Photograph of Hendrik Ibsen by Gustav Borgen

Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring For Yourself  is one of the bibles of the recovery movement and it reflects a sentiment that's a product of an age in which the jargon by which some relationships end is an assertion of psychic real estate, “I need my own space.” Everyone wants to be free to maximize their potential (it’s virtually an epidemic) and dependency is looked at as a straightjacket that inhibits individual growth. But actually dependency can be loads of fun. If Codependent No More sold millions of copies, the anti-Christ for dependedaphobes might be CoDependent Yes More. One of the basic tenets of such a volume might be that being entwined and enmeshed produces shared memory and experience. Today many married couples live separate lives. There are many couples who see each other less than people who simply date. Everyone is so busy fulfilling their potential that they have no time for each other. Nothing is deemed more horrible than one person sacrificing their chance to be the person they always wanted to be for the sake of the relationship. But is being the person you always wanted to be always so great. As far back as the l9th Century, Henrik Ibsen realized that self-realization could be a two edged sword. A Doll’s House shows the negative side of co-dependency, but Ibsen seemed to become chastened by his own experience. Later plays like The Master Builder are ambivalent towards the search. Striving for greatness, which can be the obverse of self-hatred, is not always what it’s cracked up to be. Solness, the creative who is the hero of Ibsen’s Master Builder who seeks to build “castles in the sky,” also resembles Icarus whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.