Old Play in Manhattan

John Gabriel Borkman (by Henrik Ibsen; produced by the American Repertory Theater) is the second-to-last of Ibsen's plays and second-best Ibsen. Yet much of it is powerful in a somewhat old-fashioned way, and John Gabriel Borkman himself, even though not encountered till he is more of a ruin than a man, is a commanding figure.

Borkman (Victor Jory) had had a vast, almost visionary, lust for power; and to get it, he gave up love. Yet he failed, for all that--he overreached himself, went to prison, embittered his success-worshiping wife, emerged a pariah who for eight years shut himself up, futilely nursing his grandiose dream. When his wife's sister--the woman he loved and should have married--comes, herself dying, to reproach yet try to reshape him, she is too late. Leaving his house with her, Borkman dies of "the cold."

A study of blasted lives, and a harsh but not uncompassionate indictment of the ambition that blasted them, John Gabriel Borkman seethes with the fiercely neurotic emotions of deeply frustrated people. Only in his later scenes does Playwright Ibsen lose his grip; the too-symbolic ending points a moral better than it adorns a tale.

Last week's production was frequently sharp theater, but was thrown badly off center by Actor Jory's failure to make Borkman either the dominating or the large-dimensioned figure he should be. His Borkman was much too hollowly histrionic, too ostentatiously "tragic." It was Eva Le Gallienne and Margaret Webster, as the two sisters, who did most to pace the play.

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