Lewis' pillar talk

Feminists of both sexes should recoil from Marianne Elliott's misguided revival of an Ibsen play that celebrates women for trying to redeem caddish men or self-sacrificing themselves on the altar of the selfish male ego. Pillars of the Community, in a lucid, not too modern-sounding version by Samuel Adamson, remains the least revived of Ibsen's mature plays.

The early, comic-satirical slant, with sanctimonious ladies and a religiose schoolmaster gathered for malicious gossip, is nicely conveyed on Rae Smith's bare, crepuscular set. Lesley Manville's Lona Hessel, swathed in silk and her half-brother, Joseph Milson's impassioned Johan, returned from America, cause a censorious tutting of tongues.

Yet how do you assess whether Ibsen was writing glib melodrama or scathing satire. It looks as if he did not really know himself.

Consider the evidence. In the excessive climactics of the final act, Damian Lewis's rotter of a shipbuilder, Karsten Bernick, delivers an artful speech to the silly, gullible crowd, explaining how he has abandoned his greedy capitalist ways.

He even admits having long ago allowed his brother-in-law, Johan, to take the rap for him in a small, sexual and financial scandal. Dressed in the guise of humility and repentance, reconciled to his son, to an unloved wife, Betty (a doleful Geraldine Alexander), and applauded by Lona, who has just generously destroyed letters that would incriminate him, Lewis exudes blandness. His Bernick looks the smooth, duplicitous part, but is gripped by emotional constipation.

Miss Elliott charges these glibly unconvincing scenes with the thick cream of winsomeness and sentiment. Admittedly, the closing moments, when the stage is deluged with rain, reminds us what Bernick concealed from the crowd: that he was quite prepared to allow an unseaworthy ship to set sail for America in bad weather.

Surely, therefore, Ibsen intended a black-comedy approach, satire at the expense of naive, small-town people, taken in by a smooth businessman, rather than by Miss Elliott's sentimental approach.

Yet Lona, whom Lesley Manville wrongly plays as a jaded sophisticate rather than a tough truth-teller, emerges, believing Bernick has been transformed thanks to her selfless inspiration. Meanwhile, Brid Brennan's poignant Marta has spent years hopelessly waiting Johan's return. Both women, for whom Ibsen invites approval as "pillars of the community", waste their lives either propping up a rotten man or trying to save him.

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Pillars Of The Community