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Pillars Of The Community
by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Samuel Adamson
Directed by Marianne Elliott
at Lyttleton Theatre at the National Theatre
South Bank, London SE1
Call +44 (0) 20 7452 3000 Tickets £10 - £36
Wed – Sat 7.30pm; Sat Mats 2.15pm
Running time 2 hours 50 mins with intermission
Through 4 February 2006
The Hollow Men Who Lead Us
This little performed early (1877) Ibsen is given a make over by Samuel Adamson and an expensive looking outing on the National Theatre’s enormous Lyttleton stage. The huge, sparsely furnished all purpose room in the home of shipbuilder, Karsten Bernick, is the setting for the examination of small men with big ambitions like wealth and power, and bigger men with smaller ambitions like honesty and integrity.
Indeed, there are many moments when the juxtaposition of little humans in a vast setting seemed to lead the reasons for giving the play the treatment (22 actors) really only possible in a massively subsidised company like the National. Director, Marianne Elliot did her best to keep interest in the piece alive for nearly three hours. Not always easy.
With a perpetual mist outside hanging ominously over the beautifully costumed, outwardly urbane proceedings, designed by Rae Smith, the story of Karsten Bernick’s deception, fraud and cover up, is played out to it’s conclusion. The gesture by Johan Tonneson, passionately played by Joseph Millson, in taking the rap for Bernick in order to preserve the latter’s good name, however, becomes too much for him to bear, and brings about the play’s denouement.
The huge responsibility placed on Bernick’s shoulders in leading his community to ‘progress’ and wealth (especially his own) finds a parallel in the requirement of Damian Lewis, playing the part, to produce the levels of guilty self justification necessary in Ibsen’s gripping study in hypocrisy. However this complex character’s late rite of passage is given, instead, a slight, shallow reading, embellished with more arm waving than I’ve seen since the disappearance of traffic cops from our lives. That the man was plausible and greedy is not enough. He had to have depths of cruelty only to be imagined at, given his conspiracy to commit mass murder to hide his past. Only then does his road to Damascus have any poignancy.
Leslie Manville as Johan’s sister Lona produces some richly found moments, which belie the trivia surrounding the lives of Ibsen’s women. Paul Moriarty gave Aune, the foreman in Bernick’s shipyard a resigned dignity which spoke to the different stars that the two men followed.
Inevitably, and on cue, the looming thunderstorm broke, bringing impressive, teeming rainfall, revealing the National Theatre’s ugly plumbing fittings.
Somewhat Recommended
Saul Reichlin
London correspondent
Chicago Stage Talk Radio Show
www.ChicagoCritic.com
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