Haunted house

Ibsen's Rosmersholm is a home where tragedy strikes

by Steve Vineberg

ROSMERSHOLM.By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Raymond Munro. Set and lighting designed by Josh Rothenberg. Costumes by Catherine Quick Spingler. With Shawn LaCount, Molly Hale, Albert Aeed, Neil Schroeder, Valerie Fidler, and Joshua Duksin. At Little Center Theatre, Clark University, April 10, 11, 12, and 13.

It's unlikely that any company except a university group would perform Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm, though it's a strange and beautiful play. It's set in a home (Rosmersholm) that has seen tragedy and is haunted by it -- and, in the Ibsen manner, is doomed to be claimed by it. Pastor John Rosmer's wife, Beata, committed suicide by leaping into the millstream. In the year since her death, he has changed considerably under the influence of Rebecca West, a vivacious young woman who came into the house to care for Beata and has remained to watch over him. He's left the church, he's adopted more liberal ideas, and he enjoys a free and confidential -- though platonic -- relationship with Rebecca that isn't easily defined, certainly not by Victorian standards. The play is an unraveling of a past shrouded in mystery, a process occasioned by Rosmer's revealing his new progressive thinking to his old friend Dr. Kroll, the local headmaster.

Rosmer's metamorphosis and his opposition by a staunch conservative echo the relationship between Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders in Ghosts, and the self-willed Rebecca suggests a mixture of other Ibsen women, like Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder and Asta in Little Eyolf. Rosmer is a peculiarly Ibsen-like intellectual. He makes grand pronouncements but is somehow stymied by the extent to which he's willing to take his own convictions; he ends up weaving a net to trap himself in. Ibsen parodies the conservative Kroll, who's terrified into behaving viciously, but he doesn't allow us to take much comfort in Rosmer, who seems, finally, to be as susceptible to the influence of the people around him as Kroll accuses him of being. Besides, the playwright also parodies Rosmer's old tutor, Ulrich Brendel, who, we're told repeatedly, planted the seeds of liberalism in Rosmer's schoolboy brain. By the time the play begins, Brendel's become a ridiculous old drunk, cadging money for liquor out of his old pupil.

The big question with Rosmersholm, as with other Ibsen plays like John Gabriel Borkman, Little Eyolf, The Lady from the Sea, and even an acknowledged masterpiece like The Master Builder, is, How the hell do you make them work on stage? A Doll House can work if you do it carefully, and certainly Hedda Gabler and even Ghosts; I can visualize (though I've never actually seen) a successful production of The Wild Duck. But most of the others, though they excite the imagination on the page, end up seeming both too Victorian and too cerebral on stage. Clark University's production of Rosmersholm, under the direction of Raymond Munro, is a creditable attempt. Munro and the designers (Josh Rothenberg, set and lighting; Catherine Quick Spingler, costumes) succeed in creating a compelling atmosphere, and you're held at least through the first half. The cast struggles nobly with the Rolf Fjelde translation, which is as unyielding as translations from the Norwegian generally seem to be. Everyone on stage shows intelligence in handling the text, and both Shawn LaCount, who plays John, and Molly Hale, who plays Rebecca, have lovely moments, especially in act one. But the production on the whole doesn't loosen the play -- doesn't give it dramatic life. You walk away baffled.

Munro has made some bold staging choices, like having Rosmer rush into a corner under a stairway during a scene of high emotion and playing Rebecca's encounter with Kroll -- in which he tells her what he's learned of her hidden past -- as a seduction. (Albert Aeed needs to vary his attack on Kroll's lines; he reads too many of them in an ironic tone.) Unfortunately, the effect of these choices is to add another layer of obfuscation, not to clarify what's already there. Oftentimes in Ibsen you wonder what's wrong with the characters; I suspect it's the realism in these plays that provides the grounds for our working them out. Munro's occasional forays into anti-realism (the Kroll-Rebecca scene plays like an interpolation from Pinter) don't seem to be the answer. But I admired him for searching for one, and indeed for unearthing this play, which I was delighted to get back in touch with. The production feels like a quest that Munro and his actors make every night to get closer to the heart of Henrik Ibsen.