Ibsen's latest and disturbing work is a spectacle of rare beauty

For his first staging at Cervantes - striking is that he has not directed before in this theater -, Rubén Szuchmacher accepted the great challenge of facing Henrik Ibsen's latest play, When We the Dead Awaken. A work that, as a move, was not a project of its own. It was, on the other hand, in 2003, What happened when Nora left her husband or the pillars of societies, shock piece of Elfriede Jelinek, a kind of ruthless satire, a very black continuation of Dollhouse that throws her candorosa, inexperienced protagonist into the Germany of the 20s of the last century, that is , when the serpent's egg hatched.

Szuchmacher had enthusiastically discovered this text - from 1977 - in Paris, and managed to premiere it at San Martín with a team in which two of his regular collaborators shone: Gonzalo Córdova in lighting, and Jorge Ferrari in stage and costume design. Both artists also stand out in Cuando nos los muertos..., the recent premiere at Cervantes that will remain on display until April (and already in May the very dynamic director and régisseur will present Menotti's opera The Consul at Colón).

It is also worth remembering that in the numerous cast of Lo que paso... there was a carat actor by Horacio Peña, who is currently playing the difficult role of Arnold Rubek, the bitter autumn sculptor who spends his summer in a spa in Norway, a country to which he triumphantly returned after walking around the world his work teacher, The Day of Resurrection. However, neither the success nor the money nor the presence of his young wife, whom he has been married to for five years, seems to bring him any happiness.

The disagreement of this incompatible couple is clear from the first scene of the piece that Ibsen unveiled in 1899. And that he thought of it as the first in a trilogy that he could no longer write because the effects of a stroke prevented him from doing so. The enormous playwright and poet would die in 1906, at 78, not before having earned, among other recognitions - he also received unfavourable reviews and caused scandal in his time - that of a very young James Joyce, who in April 1900 published in the influential and demanding Fortnightly Review a review about When We... that Ibsen considered “very benevolent” in a letter to the editor, expressing his wish that he would thank J.J. for his knowledge of Norwegian (Dano-Norwegian, at that time).

Joyce would always remember the emotion she had experienced when that letter (which Ibsen probably dictated to his wife) reached his hands. In fact, J.J., who had read The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), by George Bernard Shaw, took the trouble of studying Norwegian to read in their original language those works that interested him so much. Later, he wrote two other articles on H.I., particularly praising Hedda Gabler where, he believed, “Ibsen achieves perfection.” The Irishman later admitted how he had been inspired by the author, appreciated his absolute indifference to the established canons and declared himself “proud to notice how your battles encouraged me (...), those that were fought in your mind, and your resolve to snatch the secret of life (...). You walked in the light of your inner heroism.” And another Irishman, Shaw, whom Borges called “the most illustrious of the evangelists” of the Wraith maker, openly considered Ibsen “the modern Shakespeare”.

Going back to Dolls House, it is fair to mention that locally, with the signature of Griselda Gambaro, this work deserved a kind of lucid, original spin off with a gender focus: Dear Ibsen: Soy Nora (2013), where the lark of Torvaldo challenges its creator turned into a character who has no other choice but gambetting the claims, Nora Helmer's reasons that show her paternalistic point of view. She moves the floor and decides for herself what her own path should be. Almost the opposite of the disorted Nora of What Happened..., by Jelinek, although both authors, very different from each other, assume themselves feminists. Dear Ibsen was performed in an unforgettable way by Belén Blanco who then, in 2017 -indirectly fulfilling her desire to make Hedda Gabler- launched without a net to play Diego Manso's one-man Kinderbuch. Ravaging, explosive rewriting that attracts this mortally bored woman in her comfortable confinement to the present time, in this version carrying an advanced pregnancy, who bluntly denies motherhood, married to an official who does not love, who weaves and writes and rants verbalizing that absolute discomfort that is known, because it is a a very represented and filmed piece - must culminate in tragedy. Double tragedy in this version that in Blanco's playful performance became practically unbearable.

The power of art versus the forces of nature?

Written when it was in his plans to be the beginning of a triptych, Ibsen calls “dramatic epilogue” to When We Dead Awaken. The adaptation by Szuchmacher and Lautaro Vilo partly condenses the original text - which remains discursive and requires an attentive audience, willing to make their own reflections - and takes the story back to the 30s of the twentieth century. There are no silenced family secrets that emerge here, but yes, as in other pieces by this author, there is the returning past, the betrayal of his own ideals, the concept of inevitable destiny that leads Rubek to declare time and again that he was born to be an artist, which will never be anything else. However, when he loses the source of his creativity, he embezzles his talent in commissions from people he despises, and for whom he collects a lot of money.

Rubek, then, is spending a summer season in a spa establishment with his wife Maia. Water and oil: there is not the slightest correspondence between the two. It would be presumed that he married her, beautiful and young, to spice up his image as a successful sculptor, and that Maia's union ensured her social and economic advancement. At the beginning of the first act, at that breakfast, the mutual annoyance is exposed, the insurmountable distance that disconnects them. The crisis ensues when Rubek's old muse reappears (or is it following him?) in a ghostly state, in search of a reckoning with the creator, in turn closer to the harp than to the chisel.

Irene, the model of The Day of Resurrection which is defined as a living dead woman, slips in white, followed, attended, watched over by a woman in black whom the didascalia names as a deaconess (single or widow who in the early Church performed some ecclesiastical functions) but whose silent actions resemble those of a therapeutic companion. In her delirium, Irene gives clues that she was hospitalized. The woman in black will only speak at the close, addressing the public to tell her a phrase that comes from the New Testament and is part of the Catholic Mass in Latin, Pax Vobiscum. That is, peace be with you. Precisely the phrase that Jesus said when he appeared before the apostles after his resurrection.

While the dialogue takes place between Irene and Rubek, whom she calls by her first name, Arnold, another opposite couple begins to form: the pizpireta wife with her feet on the ground leaves the scene with Ulfheim, the vulgar, boastful, macho bear hunter, free of compassion but who opens up to Maia a world of sensations, of possible exciting adventures in the forest and mountains.

In her rancour-tinged delirium, Irene claims to have killed a husband, several children as soon as they were born; she claims that she showed herself naked at a variety fair earning a lot of money, that she was dead for years and that she has now been resurrected. And he accuses Arnold Rubek of having defiled the depths of his being by not touching her when she, at his request as a sculptor, offered himself in all her nakedness. And instantly, he contradicts himself: “If you had touched me, I would have killed you on the spot.” Every now and then, Irene wields a small dagger that she carries with her. He hid himself in his capacity as an artist, “above all else, sick for creating the great work of my life: a young woman who awakens from the sleep of death (...). I had to be the noblest, the pure one (...) You had everything and you gave yourself so happy, you left your family and followed me.”

Between Rodin, Camille Claudel, Edvard Munch

Here it is necessary to draw some parallel with the passionate story of Augusto Rodin and Camille Claudel, which several scholars relate to the plot of this work, although they always emphasize that the extraordinary sculptor was much more than a muse. A collaborator from a very young age in the workshop of the renowned artist 25 years older, at 20 Camille actively worked on such important works as The Bourgeois of Calais (1884). Both influenced each other and were lovers between 1882 and 1892, when Rodin left her for her former official lover Rose Beuret, whom he would later marry, after having an affair with a student. The rupture destabilized Camille who, in any case, continued to create beautiful sculptures, challenging the sexist morality of the moment with her nudes.

Coming from a family of stale Catholicism, sister of the writer and diplomat Paul Claudel, rejected by her mother, Camille's mental health deteriorates, convinced that Rodin is the cause of her misfortunes. She was forcibly committed to a nursing home in 1913, where her family restricted visits and correspondence. Despite the conditions of that detention, it improved in 1919, but the mother refused to be transferred to another, more open institution. The pious Paul calls her “crazy” in his diary. 30 years in prison Camille Claudel resisted, and died of malnutrition in 1943.

It is proven that Ibsen knew about the romance of Rodin and Camille, the end so unfortunate for her, although obviously - due to a matter of dates - she did not know about the sculptor's hospitalization in an asylum. It could be surmised that his clairvoyance as a poet made him guess a future of madness for Camille, madness that he transferred to the character of Irene. The unquestionable thing is that he gave his sculptor the same initials as the French artist.

On the other hand, in When We... there are features of Ibsen's biography that echo in Rubek, the sculptor who became famous outside his country and who returns after many years.

In his maturity, Ibsen had an exchange with the young Munch, a Norwegian, 35 years younger. The writer attended the exhibition where The Three Stages of Women was exhibited, greeted each other with the painter who wrote: “He spent a long time looking at the painting. I told him that the brunette among the logs is the nun, the shadow of the woman, pain and death. The naked one is the one who loves life. Near them, the light woman goes to the sea, to infinity: she is the woman of longing. Among the trunks, on the right side is an agonizing man, without understanding.”

Four years after the exhibition, when Munch read what would be Ibsen's last work, he realized that the three female characters in the “Dramatic Epilogue” had been inspired by his painting. Later, this artist designed posters of Ibsen's works and accepted the request of director Max Reinhardt, from Berlin, to make scenographic sketches for Spectros, one of Ibsen's most staged works. Everything indicates that there was a bond of sympathy, of mutual understanding between the playwright and the painter. Both, on different dates, suffered rejection, were recognized belatedly, in the first instance outside their own country. Both chose art over life.

Norwegian mists at Cervantes

In perfect complicity with Córdova, Ferrari and the sounds of Bárbara Togander - that kind of Gestalt that has borne such memorable fruits with the director - Rubén Szuchmacher has produced a show of unusual beauty and depth that never tries to soften or attenuate this disturbing work, which sows disturbing enigmas, which does not offers no form of comfort and neither does it propose to identify with its characters. Few characters that actors and actresses defend surrounded by a nature that is exquisitely stylized by scenery, light and music, who reach peaks of aesthetic search precisely in that third final act, where the mountain and its grandeur must be represented with those stairs that evoke Escher, which do not lead to nowhere.

*When we dead wake up, by Henrik Ibsen. Cast: Horacio Peña, Claudia Cantero, Veronica Pelaccini, Alejandro Vizzotti, Andrea Jaet, Jose Mehrez. Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 20, at $600. 85 minutes. Cervantes Theatre. Click here for tickets

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