John Gabriel Borkman
Bridge Theatre | ★★★★✩

Through such indisputably great plays as A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler and even Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen did more than any other playwright to argue for women’s emancipation.

But although this lesser performed work is defined by a man who has damaged the lives of everyone around him, the author is less interested in the moral hypocrisy of patriarchal 19th-century society here than the hubris and arrogance of those who believe in their own infallibility.

At at least that’s how it feels in Nicholas Hytner’s simmering production.
These qualities, which only exist in the powerful, are superbly embodied by Simon Russell Beale as the eponymous, disgraced banker who was once jailed for fraud and who holds onto the belief that the sentence was unjust even though he accepts he was guilty.

He was motivated by high ideals, which, he argues to his only visitor, his sycophantic accountant (Michael Simkins), makes all the difference.

Lucinda Coxon’s updated script sets the play in a concrete modernist house (design Anna Fleischle) and allows Beale wry asides about his embittered wife Gunhild that could almost exist in a modern sitcom.

7. L-r Clare Higgins (Gunhild Borkman) and Sebastian De Souza (Erhart Borkman), photo by Manuel Harlan

Clare Higgins (Gunhild Borkman) and Sebastian De Souza (Erhart Borkman)

However, Clare Higgins in the role keeps the play anchored with a terrifyingly embittered performance as Borkman’s wife who watches her flat-screen TV to the rhythm of her husband’s footsteps in the room above.

Though estranged by the ignominy he has brought on the family name, the couple at least have in common the deluded hope that they might one day be rehabilitated to high society. He places his hope in his accusers missing his business acumen so much that they will one day come grovelling back to him.

Meanwhile, she places hers in the prospects of her good son Erhart (Sebastian De Souza) becoming the pillar that his father once was. Erhart, of course, has other plans driven by a zest for both life and Fanny Wilton (Ony Uhiara), a lady of irresistible ill repute.

To be with Fanny or stay with the stultifying adults who raised him, including his well-meaning though dying aunt Ella (Lia Williams) is no choice at all for the young man.

Ibsen has a knack for conveying human circumstances that feel as permanent as the landscape in which his people live while at the same time transporting his audience to the moment where it all unravels in double-quick time.

Here that transition has a virtuosic quality. This is partly because of Daisy Ou as the pianist daughter of Borkman’s accountant who comforts Borkman with her playing and accompanies scene changes so beautifully you want them to go one for ever.

But it is also because of those footsteps that echo through the house like a metronomic beat counting the long seconds of Borkman’s purgatory.