Mrs Affleck reminds us how risky it is to attempt the wholesale rewriting and updating of a classic text. It is an outstanding example of the vanity of the interfering playwright who imagines he can cast fresh light upon a classic original by reconstituting it. The talented Samuel Adamson has seized Little Eyolf, Ibsen’s late, great drama of sexual guilt and desire, and ravished it. He has taken liberties with its principal characters and their predicaments, transporting them from the late 19th century Norwegian seaside to the Kent Coast in 1955, a clunking allusion to the fact that in both periods women were fettered and commodified.
Adamson spatters his text with the distraction of 1950s key words, from Churchill and Princess Margaret to Journey into Space and Hopalong Cassidy. Ironically, the fruit of his labours is a play less modern, psychologically shocking or challenging than Ibsen’s original. What’s more, Marianne Elliott’s fine, erotically charged production on a traverse stage that encompasses both esplanade and spacious kitchen, suggests she would have rendered a fascinating version of the original.
Adamson calls his play "from Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf", implying he used the original as a springboard. How little is interestingly sprung though. William Archer’s original 1890s translation sends down thunderbolts: failed writer Alfred Almers nurses a passion for his equally smitten half-sister, Asta,whose imaginary presence enhanced love-making with his wife. Worse, Almer’s infant son, Eyolf, was irreparably injured as an infant when left unattended while his parents had sex.
In Adamson’s version, after Eyolf drowns in the sea, coaxed not by Ibsen’s sinister Rat Wife but by Adamson’s leather-jacketed teddy-boy in an Elvis quiff, the marriage of Rita and Alfred Affleck is rent asunder. Adamson, however, does not develop Ibsen’s veiled erotic scenario or emphasise what differences there were between Norwegian codes of regimentation for women in the 1890s and English ones in the 1950s. At least there is a driving energy about the acting.
Claire Skinner’s shrill, taut Rita, brims with sexual frustration and jealousy while busying herself in her smart, Formica-topped kitchen. Her sister-in-law (Naomi Frederick’s impressively intense school teacher) sits by the sea with Angus Wright’s superb Alfred after Eyolf’s death. They gaze at each other, both grief-struck and mutually enthralled. If only they had been in Ibsen not Adamson.
Booking to 29 April (020 7452 3000).
Mrs Affleck
National Theatre: Cottesloe
South Bank, SE1 9PX
