Well, not quite, but we have completed the first four performances and on Thursday we begin the final four. By midday on Sunday, four months of work, and a terrific set that drew spontaneous applause, will have disappeared "And these our actors/ As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/ Are melted into air, into thin air/ [... and] Leave not a wrack behind." Why do I do it?!
Anyway, I am very grateful and touched by your good wishes. It has gone well. As usual I am racked by doubts about how I handled it all and irritated by what seem to me now, having watched four performances, to be very obvious faults and errors. As I once heard a nervous actress exclaim in a dressing-room 5 minutes before 'Beginners', "Do other people have a hobby that makes them feel sick?"
I can't say I warm to Ibsen any more than when I began. The play is brilliant theatre despite being the grimmest of grim tragedies. I admire it with an almost sick fascination, somewhat similar to watching one of those Leni Riefenstahl documentaries which are beautifully filmed until you remember what it is they extol. There is some wry humour in it for me when I realise that feminists consider Ibsen to be a hero and his fictional heroines to be icons of the women's liberation movement. The fact is, of course, that the nasty, old brute didn't give a fig for women's liberation (or anything else come to that), all he was concerned with was to pull down and destroy the prevailing society. Needless to say, well it would be needless if some feminists weren't so dim, he treated his own women abominably. As he himself put it, and I paraphrase, 'as soon as the mob reach where I am now, I will already have moved on!'.
I also enjoyed some sardonic humour at the expense of part of my 'post-modernist' audience, particularly the younger members, who indulged in snorts of derision at the sentiments and precepts thundered out by Pastor Manders, Ibsen's villain of the piece. These sentiments, in a different context would be wholly admirable and humane but, of course, Ibsen, the clever Goebbels to Nietzsche's insane ramblings, spins them on their axis and makes them sound despicable.
And next - Hamlet. (Oh, my God!)
My feminist tract will appear next week, so stay tuned!
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