Enduring love

The super-selling Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø once told me how much he had learned from the plays of his nation’s greatest dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Although never formally detective stories, Ibsen’s naturalistic plays have gripping narratives and use plots common in the crime genre, such as family secrets (Hedda Gabler, Ghosts) or civic scandal (John Gabriel Borkman, An Enemy of the People).

Little Eyolf, a late-career play from 1894 that Richard Eyre has adapted and directed, even features that almost obligatory element of contemporary popular fiction – the lost child.

Alfred Allmers, an academic working on a book that will explain the workings of the world, was an orphan whose relationship with his half-sister, Asta, is rooted in mutual ador­ation that seems to flirt with the possibility of incest. To Asta’s tangible unease, her brother is now married to Rita, whose only child is crippled as a result of an injury that happened while the parents were distracted by passion.

Alfred’s guilt over Eyolf’s first mishap leads him flamboyantly to renounce scholarly work in order to care for his son. When their son suffers a greater second catastrophe, Rita’s response is shockingly to confide that she is glad to be childless again as motherhood weakened her marriage.

Able to be more verbally specific about these undercurrents than Ibsen himself and earlier adapters were, Eyre brings out the astounding extent to which Ibsen was already putting on stage syndromes and psychoses that Freud was only beginning to diagnose in his consulting rooms.

Alfred’s sudden devotion to his son may be a clever way of glossing acceptance of his scholarly inadequacy, while Rita’s ambivalence towards her son is perhaps driven by irritation that he opens up another flank in the battle for Alfred that she has already long been fighting with Asta. Daringly, this is a rare play in which a child character is the antagonist.

The Rat-Woman, who drops in on the Allmers promising to rid their house of unwanted vermin, has previously seemed to me too stampingly metaphorical in a play that otherwise proceeds through nuance, the suggestion that this pied piper somehow imposes a supernatural note on a naturalistic narrative. In this production, though, I apprehended the other possibility that the child follows her because he knows he is unwanted.

Sharply reshaping the original three acts to a slick, single-location 80 minutes, Eyre draws performances from Jolyon Coy, Lydia Leonard and Eve Ponsonby, as Alfred, Rita and Asta, which – through subtle choices of expression, inflection and positioning – reflect the tensions that come from the presence of three people (or four, including Eyolf) in a marriage, and catch the balance between self-hatred and love for another in characters that properly jostle our levels of sympathy towards them.

This is Eyre’s third revelatory Ibsen adaptation – after Hedda Gabler and Ghosts – and makes me eager to see what he might do with The Wild Duck or When We Dead Awaken. Shakespeare is often credited as a dramatist who always seems contemporary, but it is Ibsen’s plays, for me, that feel permanently topical.