A handful of times during Alan Rickman's performance as John Gabriel Borkman, the audience at Dublin's Abbey theatre lets out a laugh. Sometimes it is because of references to dubious banking practices, which seem to us newly topical, but the rest of the time it is because of Borkman's casual misogyny. In the translation by Frank McGuinness, his lines include: "If there are good women, we don't know them," and: "I suppose it's reasonable to see things as you do. You are a woman."
I've seen this kind of reaction to Ibsen plays before and I'm never very certain about it. If the audience regards Borkman's opinions as funny, can it also take him seriously as a tragic hero, even a flawed one? Society has changed so much in the past century that it is hard to imagine a man conceiving these ideas, still less expressing them in public. By contrast, Ibsen's own audiences, a decade or two before the suffragettes, must have included those who believed "one woman is no better than another". For them, Borkman would have been less a reactionary oaf than a man genuinely caught out by society's shifting values.
It is still possible to express this today. In the fine production of Ibsen's A Doll's House just opened at Dundee Rep, Neil McKinven plays Torvald Helmer with great compassion. He is a genial, likeable sort, whose only flaw is a preoccupation with work. It means that when he expresses his patrician values, principally the idea that his wife Nora is nothing more than an extension of himself, we find them disturbing but also credible. We don't laugh because, even though we don't share his worldview, we can understand it.
But have I got it wrong? The other evening, I made a similar point to Jeremy Raison, outgoing director of Glasgow's Citizens theatre, and he suggested Ibsen planted the laughs deliberately. In my review of Raison's production of Ibsen's Ghosts, I wrote that Pastor Manders's "homilies about marital fidelity" produced "derisory laughter", a response the director believes the playwright intended. In Norway, he said, they stage Ibsen more as domestic comedy than the weighty drama we assume here.
In her review of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea in Manchester this week, Lyn Gardner refers to the play's "sly humour" and it is certainly true that director Lee Breuer managed to express Ibsen's radicalism while having a great deal of fun in Mabou Mines DollHouse, a production with an Amazon Nora and a dwarf Torvald as well as lots of silly Scandinavian accents. It is hard to imagine that's what Ibsen had in mind, but he might have appreciated the lighter touch.
If he is taken too seriously, he would not be alone. Chekhov, for example, suffered particularly from our humour bypass when his plays arrived in Britain. The evidence of the first UK production of The Cherry Orchard in 1911 is that it was worthy but dull, much like the subsequent stagings of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. It wasn't until a 1925 revival of The Cherry Orchard that the penny dropped. "Once we knew we were allowed to laugh, of course, everything fell into place and took on meaning," recalled the critic WA Darlington.
Even on our own turf, we can find ourselves getting overly po-faced. We tend to treat the tragedies of Shakespeare as though every second had to be laden with gloom. Acknowledging the comedy, however, can unleash waves of energy and build a poignant contrast to the seriousness. It is something that often happens in the democratic space of the Globe and it happened, for example, in Malachi Bogdanov's very funny 1998 production of Richard III which used a kindergarten setting both for comic effect and to make a point about the immature nature of the king's brutality.
So if I grumble about people laughing at Ibsen, am I being a pedant, like theatre's answer to Network Rail apologising for the wrong kind of humour in the stalls, or are some jokes better than others?
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