Little Eyolf

by Henrik Ibsen

seen at the Alemida Theatre on 17 December 2015

The play is directed by Richard Eyre, in a new adaptation by the director based on a literal translation by Anne and Karin Bamborough. It features Jolyon Coy as Alfred Allmers, Lydia Leonard as his wife Rita, Eve Ponsonby as his sister Asta, Sam Hazeldine as Bjarne Borgheim, Eileen Walsh as the Woman (the so-called 'Rat Wife'), and Adam Greaves-Neal (in this performance) as Eyolf (the son of Alfred and Rita). The set is designed by Tim Hatley and lit by Peter Mumford.

At eighty intense minutes, played without a break, this is a distillation of an already comparatively short play in which a married couple, drifting apart in unhappiness and recrimination even before the catastrophe which concludes the first act, are stretched to breaking point by the accidental drowning of their crippled young son Eyolf. 

Lydia Leonard brings a fierceness to her thwarted passion for her husband which leads her to express an intolerable jealousy of her son for capturing her husband's attention - to say nothing of the long frustration of seeing his devotion to his young half-sister. Faced with the enormity of a real loss she is in even greater distress, but she manages somehow to combine grief with continued steeliness.

In contrast, Jolyon Coy's Alfred is another Ibsen idealist, hopelessly out of touch with himself while imagining that he has realised his mission in life - the transferral of his ambition to write a book to his glorious project of educating his son is still woefully self-centred. His impatience and disgust with his wife is dangerously intensified by the dream romanticism of his attachment to Asta; his inability to see any problem arising out of her revelation that she is not in fact a blood relative is yet another sign of his emotional incompetence. 

Eve Ponsonby's Asta, almost buckling under the grief of losing her place in the household, appears nonetheless more clear sighted, even as she allows herself to accept the attentions of a man she does not truly love. (Sam Hazeldine brings a welcome air of gruff decency to the role of Borgheim.)

Out of all this misery and these cross purposes, something hopeful emerges as Rita and Alfred slowly grope towards an accommodation and the possibility of a renewed purpose. Their philanthropic project may seem like nothing more that a new self-regarding gesture, but they acknowledge its fragility and difficulty, and as a way out of their tormented grief, it is powerfully moving.

The set, a verandah of stripped pale wood overlooking a fjord, mirrors the aseptic domestic environment, and allows for austerely beautiful shifts in the lighting as the sun rises or as evening sets in. The decision to include some projections of swirling water, and of the dead child's eyes (referred to by Rita as an inescapable vision) is perhaps more questionable, since the extremity of the characters' emotions hardly needs such literal underpinning, but the production as a whole is yet another Almeida triumph in an altogether fine year of productions.