Revisionist approaches to Ibsen are all the rage. Whereas Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People, which opened the Barbican’s International Ibsen season, enhanced the original, I felt this version by Belvoir Sydney of Ibsen’s greatest tragicomedy subtly diminishes its source. It’s no tame turkey, but director Simon Stone, with his co-writer Chris Ryan, gives us potted duck. Stone retains the events of Ibsen’s play but compresses them into 80 minutes.
As in the original, we see the scruffily contented Ekdal family reduced to ruin through the misguided intervention of Gregers Werle. Events proceed with gunshot rapidity inside a Perspex box as TV monitors register the precise time everything takes place. Clearly, the intention is to strip Ibsen of what Stone sees as his superfluous realism to give us the essence of a domestic tragedy.
The biggest issue is the treatment of Gregers Werle. Ibsen provides drama’s definitive portrait of the torch-bearing, missionary idealist. Here, however, Dan Wyllie plays Gregers as a safari-suited outsider who, meeting his old university mate Hjalmar Ekdal for the first time in 18 years, wantonly exposes the lies on which the latter’s family life is based. Stone hints that Gregers, having experienced a disastrous love affair, cannot bear to see other people’s happiness.
While Stone’s approach is psychological, Ibsen’s was social. The original play offers a devastatingly ironic portrait – one that still resonates in modern politics – of the destructiveness of the well-intentioned. Stone’s version is, in some respects, adroitly clever. The motif of failing eyesight is foregrounded, with Gregers’s father and Hjalmar’s daughter, Hedvig, each suffering from the same form of macular degeneration. There is a chilling scene where Hjalmar’s dad explains to Hedvig, in great detail, how to load and fire a shotgun.
The Australian actors are very good. Veteran John Gaden is memorably crusty as Gregers’s father. Brendan Cowell as Hjalmar, Anita Hegh as his wife, Gina, Richard Piper as his ex-jailbird father and Sara West as a sexually knowing Hedvig create a plausible picture of a family bound together by a rumpled happiness until the arrival of Gregers. We even get to see a live duck.
I was intrigued by an academic friend’s comparison of Gregers in this version to Shakespeare’s Iago. Ibsen, however, was writing about impassioned 19th-century idealism, not motive-free malignity. Despite its technical skill, this pared-down version struck me as a brisk sonata in comparison with Ibsen’s all-encompassing symphony.
• Until 1 November. Box office: 0845 120 7511. Venue: Barbican, London.
• More from the International Ibsen season: An Enemy of the People five-star review.
