A naked woman lies atop a solitary, eroded, but commanding rock formation. A duet of female voices is gradually consumed by an electronic soundscape. The woman turns away from the spirit-dominating darkness around her and, looking toward us, seems consumed by her own heavy breathing from fatigue—or is it from the desperation of anxiety? – and silence comes. In the fade out of light, she is alone, with eyes hollowed out by some distance within her, a naked body among elements — maybe earthly, maybe cosmic — she cannot control. She is naked to them.
We come to realize, not too slowly, that we share her solitude. And whatever domesticity ensues in Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea, it now can never be taken for granted, it can never be the same. Most in our culture use habit and diversion to escape solitude. Some are forced into courage and become such solitude, as it ennobles them and those who must know the depths within them. Ibsen, in this unforgettable production of his play, shows how the weight of social convention is too heavy for human spirit to bear. She shows one life at a breaking point.
And what follows this symbolically weighty and unsettling introduction? We meet a painter with a canvas on a portable easel before him. The sea he paints is no longer an inner dimension of the woman, the Lady, but a pleasing vista seen safely from afar. There is easy banter between the artist, played welcomingly gregarious by Neil Barclay, and Kyle Blair’s Lyngstrand, played self-indulgent and confident as insecure men tend to be before the world awakens them to their own posturing.
The woman to whom they refer turns out to be Ellida Wangel who loves to swim because “she loves the sea” and it “always brightens her spirits”. Indeed, she is “faithful to the sea,” but an undercurrent of tension arises when, in reference to herself, she notes that we must be “civilized”. Meanwhile, also now before us we have the pleasingly animated and securely assertive daughters of widower Dr. Wangel, a man who is brilliantly underplayed in unspoken self-awareness by Ric Reid. In Wangel’s ongoing and dignified attempt to understand, keep, and ultimately liberate his wife, Reid shows the essence of poignant and surprisingly casual understatement.
Ellida’s voice almost breaks when telling friend Professor Arnholm, played quietly vulnerable and meta-mild by Andrew Bunker, that “I need to tell someone.” We already sense a woman confined in herself, but also note that a very easy flow of banter is achieved in director Meg Roe’s perceptive direction with nothing too heavy, though implied, at this early stage of the play. Indeed, we join in tolerating the young artist’s romanticized notions and keep attentive to the overlapping exchanges in dialogue that remind one of such method in the films of Orson Welles. But each of the play’s three females is here a unique force, and the seething resentment in daughter Hilde is potent and verging on mean as, say, when she goads the incapacitated Lyngstrand.
Ellida, of course, is the most unsettled. “Being a second wife doesn’t suit you,” she is told and we believe her words, “I can’t help it if I ache for the sea”. Ellida denies her husband a sexual bed and is bound to a sailor she symbolically married long ago before he fled the law. This sailor, inseparable in all ways from the sea, has a “terrifying power” over her -“I see him all the time” she declares- and she is drawn to him in their cosmic-existential-sexual bond. She must “come freely” to him even as she fears “the temptation to surrender myself to the sea.” Meanwhile, she “struggles to breathe inland.”
Thus, married to Wangel, Ellida must choose to remain with him, uncemented as their bond might be, or submit herself and her vague passions to the seduction of the unknown, to the sailor, to the sea. “It has to be my choice,” she declares. “But it isn’t your choice,” responds Wangel, for this is Ibsen turf with its unquestioned and woman-stultifying institution of marriage at stake. “I’m anchorless here in your house,” she tells Wangel and indeed she needs no traditional bond to anchor her but, as we later find, a marriage that allows each partner the freedom to be what they are.
There are compelling parallels with the somewhat bitchy Hilde’s “longing” for one word of love from her remote stepmom, because she too needs a supportive intimate relationship. Daughter Bolette, for her part, declares, “I just want my life to start” and, owing to the poignant poise and heartfelt sparkle of Jacqueline Thair’s endearing performance, we already wonder about her future life. She is insightful and naturally mature, and we like her.
But such is the subtle potency of this humane and profound production that we are affected by all these characters as they suggest what they want and what they need, even as, in truth, we don’t really know who they are. And isn’t that the essence of a fruitful marital bond, that, as in theatre, the mate or the characters must be who they are so we ourselves can resonate with them and become more human than we have been. One hopes that viewers allow themselves to grow, to mature, as they watch a rich production such as this.
As with many productions over Jackie Maxwell’s tenure as Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, The Lady from the Sea is of an exceptional quality and one hopes that many people will see it. It serves as an insightful look at human need, at the risky possibilities in a marital bond, at the psychological reconfigurations that are crucial to human connections, and at the mythical dimension of human existence that is too often made trite and easily accessible in popular media.
There are numerous subtly focused aspects here in this fine production that, in Erin Shields’ easy-flowing but substantial take on Ibsen’s play, ring with a no-nonsense relevance to our many facades of happiness and success. The most memorable, to me at least, is how Moya O’Connell as Ellida, contained by convention as she is but bound to an unknown that only she can know, tightens ever so slightly, more and more, with each word she speaks. A silence surrounds us all as we watch these fleeting moments when a human spirit tries precariously to survive, and it is very scary.