It is a bold man who elects to revive Ibsen's penultimate play after versions by Richard Eyre, Ingmar Bergman and Peter Hall. But Stephen Unwin at English Touring Theatre is a dedicated Ibsenite. And even if his revival lacks the epic grandeur of its forbears, it gets reasonably close to the heart of this wintry masterpiece.
John Gabriel Borkman is a hard play to pull off - not merely because it starts in a drawing-room and ends on a hillside. It is also because Ibsen mixes objective irony with stringent self-criticism. In the battle between Borkman's wife and her twin sister over the former's son, Erhart, Ibsen paints a devastating picture of emotional possession. But in his portrait of Borkman, the miner's son whose Napoleonic dreams lead to the prison-house, he offers a scorching indictment of both 19th-century capitalism and, closer to home, himself. Borkman's great Wagnerian crime is to have sacrificed love to power, just as Ibsen subordinated life to art.
To get all this across requires in the playing of Borkman the kind of deluded majesty that Scofield and Richardson brought to the role. Michael Pennington, however, is an essentially lyrical, reflective actor whose Borkman never quite persuades me that he was either commercial Titan or industrial visionary. With his tight mop of silvery-blond hair, he suggests more an immured Norwegian Hamlet. What he does bring out, through sheer acting skill, is Borkman's implacable egoism. When he claims that he has sinned only against himself, and casually adds that he includes his wife and son in the word "self", Pennington suddenly makes you see the connection between the aging Borkman and the youthful Peer Gynt.
Cast against type, Pennington does a valiant job. But the real strength of Unwin's production lies in the domestic power battles over Erhart. If Borkman himself is a "sick wolf", Gillian Barge turns his wife into a ferocious tigress who will go to any lengths to protect her young. Linda Bassett as Ella looks like her sister physically, while suggesting that she is her opposite spiritually. When the two are on stage together, fighting over James Loye's unusually youthful Erhart, the production is at its best.
In fact, Unwin captures the naturalistic aspect of Ibsen excellently. What the production misses, in spite of the guillotine-like sound and flash of white light that accompanies the ending of each act, is the play's wild poetry. In Ibsen the symbolism grows out of the realism, whereas here it is imposed upon it. But no chance to catch this ironic masterpiece should be missed, and the pin-drop silence is a testament to its enduring power.
· Until March 8. Box office: 020-8858 7755. Then touring to Salford, Oxford, Bromley and Richmond.
