John Gabriel Borkman in New York

The Irish Times, 15.01.2011

Abbey's snowy Ibsen takes New York by storm

THE ABBEY Theatre's production of Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Harvey Theatre on Wednesday before a packed audience that included luminaries of the Irish cultural and diplomatic world and American sponsors of the arts.  The production, which features Fiona Shaw, Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan and John Kavanagh, broke box office records during its seven-week run in Dublin last autumn, said Abbey director Fiach Mac Conghail, who travelled to New York for the US opening.  The production will continue in Brooklyn until February 6th. Two-thirds of the tickets for the run had been sold before opening night.  Former US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith, a fan of the Abbey since her years in Dublin, called the performance 'really beautiful' and 'so well-acted'. Anne Anderson, Ireland's Ambassador to the United Nations, and writer Colum McCann also attended.  At the opening night party in the theatre, Irish-American philanthropist and chair of the American Ireland Fund Loretta Brennan Glucksman, chief executive of Culture Ireland Eugene Downes and McCann reminisced about the series of informal suppers that led to the Imagine Ireland cultural season, of which the Abbey production is an important part. Niall Burgess, former Irish consul general in New York, and actor Gabriel Byrne, Ireland's cultural ambassador, also attended the suppers.  John Gabriel Borkman tells the story of a disgraced but unrepentant banker who has served years in prison for embezzling his friends' money. 'The spectre of Bernie Madoff looms large,' Mac Conghail said. The play also 'reminds our public here in the US that we might be in some financial and political trouble, that it's not all fiction,' he said.  Board members from the Abbey Theatre Foundation, a new US group still in the process of being formed, attended the opening. 'We have two objectives,' said Mac Conghail. 'To bring the best of Irish actors and Irish theatre to the US. The second is to raise money, because there isn't money left in Ireland.'  Glucksman said she was amazed that a century-old play could be so topical: 'We could put names on it -- which I shan't right now -- but it's in our newspapers every day, the curse of greed just doesn't change and we never learn.'  Rickman, Duncan and Kavanagh delivered excellent performances, 'But it is Ms Shaw, an actress of infinite cunning, who walks away with the production,' the New York Times said yesterday, describing the set as a 'snow-piled ice palace'. Shaw plays Borkman's estranged wife, who lives one floor below him and refers to Borkman only as 'himself, the bank manager'.  'Everything about Ms Shaw's Gunhild from her hobbled walk to the way she clasps her stomach, as if trying to contain the pain within -- evokes a soul crippled by years of cancerous confinement,' said the newspaper, which called Shaw 'an expert in the art of festering' and a 'human flame-thrower'.  At the opening night party, Shaw said the Abbey's production of Frank McGuinness's new version of Borkman shows Irish theatre must broaden its horizons. 'The repertoire in Ireland must, must now start to include everything in the 17th century that we forgot,' she said. 'We must start embracing Jacobean plays, Shakespeare plays. It's our century as well.'  The US audience seemed to treat Ibsen's dark tale of a family undone as a comedy, laughing even at the most tragic moments. 'New Yorkers are much more sensitive to irony, and that's what the laughter was about,' said BAM executive producer Joe Melillo.  The Harvey Theatre was created by Peter Brook and Harvey Lichtenstein when they brought Brook's adaptation of the Sanskrit poem the Mahabharata to New York in 1987. Like Brook's Bouffes du Nord in Paris, the Harvey was derelict and has been left in its distressed state, with ceiling frescoes and columns showing its former grandeur.  In Dublin, the set for Borkman showed a late 19th-century interior. In Brooklyn, antique furniture is placed among snowdrifts on the stage, which extends into the audience.  'This theatre has an extraordinary sense of layers of history,' said Downes. 'It's like a palimpsest, with all the ghosts and layers of time. It's a unique space. The Abbey has done it proud tonight. The Abbey has done Ireland proud.'

LARA MARLOWE in Brooklyn