Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton star in a fascinating and complex play that was a favourite of Freud
by Benedict Nightingale | May 26, 2008 | The Times
At times Rosmersholm seems the most modern of Ibsen’s plays, at times the most dauntingly complex. Either way, Anthony Page’s revival maintains its grip, largely because Helen McCrory and Paul Hilton generate a quiet, unpretentious intensity while obeying the dramatist’s own orders: “No declamation, no theatricalities, express every mood in a way that seems credible and natural.”
Hilton’s Rosmer is a pastor who has lost his faith. He’s also the scion of an influential family and, as such, both a magnet and a target for his community’s warring factions. Indeed, it’s his floundering attempts to maintain a degree of idealism and become a reconciler and peacemaker that make him recognisable today. He manages to alienate both Malcolm Sinclair’s ferociously reactionary Kroll and Peter Sullivan’s Mortensgaard, the radical who aims to exploit his social and religious status. He’s that sorry figure, a piggy in the middle.
But it’s his personal problems that are the prime focus; back in 1891 they left The Times perplexed and The Observer declaring that “impossible people do wild things for no apparent reason”. And even now, perhaps especially now, it’s hard to believe that Rosmer could spend the year after his depressing wife’s suicide living with a house- keeper as beautiful and bright as McCrory’s Rebecca and remain innocently impervious both to his own attraction to her and to the talk this causes in a respectable town. Never mind. The play is another instalment in Ibsen’s running feud with tradition, convention, taboo, inhibition, the pressures of the past and whatever else prevents people discovering and expressing their essential selves. But it’s more intricate than usual, thanks to Rebecca’s sly, destructive yet not wholly self- serving ways. Just when Rosmer has got over the guilt caused by his wife’s self-drowning, Rebecca reveals that it was her insinuations which lured that millstone to her death in the millstream.
I won’t reveal the ending, only say that it’s both a proof and a denial of love, a snook at society, an admission that society is invincible, and contradictory things galore. And before that there’s enough to explain why Freud regarded Rosmersholm as his favourite play. Apart from anything else, Rebecca has an oedipal problem, maybe because she learns that her guardian was her father as well as her lover. See why I call the play complex? See why it left the critics reeling? See why it fascinates now?