Art Review: Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, SFMOMA, San Francisco

The Secret Victorianist found herself in San Francisco last week and took the opportunity to see a second exhibition dedicated to the work of Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed at the SFMOMA.

'Between the Clock and the Bed' (1940-1943)

The New York City Neue Galerie’s Munch and Expressionism, which I reviewed back in February 2016, had looked at the relationship between the Norwegian painter and his expressionist peers and featured his most enduringly famous painting — ‘The Scream’ (1893). But this SF exhibit was focused on the artist himself, highlighting the synergies between works produced by Munch at very different points in his career and life in its thematic arrangement.

Munch’s numerous self-portraits make up the centrepiece of the show, which takes its title from the 1940-1943 painting ‘Between the Clock and the Bed’, in which the artist stands, his face blurred, apparently waiting for death.

'Self-Portrait with Hand Under Cheek' (1911)

Munch stares out at visitors from every side of the room, thoughtful in pastels (‘Self-Portrait with Hand Under Cheek’, 1911), despairing with a bottle of wine (‘Self-Portrait with Wine’, 1906) and even burning in Hell (‘Self-Portrait in Hell’, 1903), underlying his interest in rendering the psychological in paint.

'Self-Portrait with Wine’ (1906)

With similar artworks side by side, Munch’s obsession with specific scenes and images, sometimes across decades, becomes clear.

‘Self-Portrait in Hell’ (1903)

There’s the death of his fourteen-year-old sister, Johanne Sophie, which he dubs ‘The Sick Child’ and plays with, using various paint techniques.

'The Sick Child' (1907)

‘The Scream’ is recognisable in the dissolving faces of ‘The Kiss’ (1897) and the backdrop to ‘Sick Mood at Sunset: Despair’ (1892).

‘The Kiss’ (1897)

Loneliness pervades the exhibition as the only way to form a relationship with others seems to be to lose something of yourself.

‘Sick Mood at Sunset: Despair’ (1892)

The last work I viewed before exiting the gallery was ‘Eye in Eye’ (1894), a painting where skeletal male and female figures reminiscent of Adam and Eve stare at each other in a contentious, more than romantic, scene. That is the tension, the question Munch brings to life — what is the price of joining your personal psychological drama and pain with another’s?

‘Eye in Eye’ (1894)

Do you know of any NYC exhibitions you’d like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: The Father, August Strindberg, Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn, New York

Two weeks ago, I reviewed director Jeffery Horowitz’s production of Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Last week, I saw the same company and creative team bring to life August Strindberg’s 1887 The Father.

Maggie Lacey and John Douglas Thompson in The Father

The two plays share many themes and, in some ways, parallel casts of characters so the decision to stage the contemporary (and rival) playwrights’ pieces in such a complementary way is an understandable one.

Here it is the father of the house, the Captain (John Douglas Thompson), whose behaviour is increasingly erratic, mirroring that of Nora in the earlier play. He’s driven mad by the uncertainty of paternity and manipulated by his wife Laura (Maggie Lacey) who sets up an unrelenting campaign against him to win control of their daughter Bertha, baulking at the unfairness of nineteenth-century marriage laws.

John Douglas Thompson in The Father

As with A Doll’s House, the ending is twisted in this production. Bertha’s cry of ‘mother’ is an accusatory one, shifting our focus again to how the remaining parent (here the mother) can remedy the loss of the other (a more modern consideration than those Strindberg and Ibsen were tackling).

Initially the inferior position of women is much more obvious than in A Doll’s House. A philandering soldier, Nordstrom (Christian J. Mallen), refuses to admit his responsibility for a servant girl’s pregnancy in a scene that firmly establishes the sexual double standard. But in this production it was hard to sympathise with the lack of options attendant on Laura’s plight. Thompson’s Captain is a little too weak too quickly and his madness seems over-egged. We’re left doubting how necessary it is that she push him over the edge.

Laurie Kennedy in The Father

Laurie Kennedy does a great job as Margaret, the Captain’s aged childhood nurse, and generally this feels like much more of an ensemble piece than its sister production.

After watching both plays, the overall message of these productions, for me, though remains confused. Apart from feeling sorry for the children what do we take from plays that apply twenty-first century issues to a nineteenth-century setting? Are the genders still at war or are we meant to conclude that being a father is the much less enviable position?

The Father is on at TFANA in Brooklyn until June 12. You can purchase tickets here.

Are there any other NYC productions you’d like to see the Secret Victorianist review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen, Theatre for a New Audience, Brooklyn, New York

In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Toril Moi writes that Nora, protagonist of his 1879 A Doll’s House begins ‘by being a Hegelian mother and daughter’ but ‘ends by discovering that she too can be an individual, and that this can be done only if she relates to the society she lives in directly, and not indirectly through her husband’. In Arin Arbus’s traditionally costumed production, currently in repertory at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, it is this transformation that is most successfully wrought.

Maggie Lacey’s Nora flits around in the early scenes, restless and alternately charming and irritating as a child (which works well with the traverse staging). As the pressure on her intensifies, she becomes increasingly manic. She invades the personal space of her interlocutors (Thorwald, Christina and Dr Rank) and displays a greater self-consciousness of the effects she—and explicitly her attractiveness—can have on others. At the drama’s famous conclusion, Lacey plays Nora entirely still. She stands tall for the first time, unmoved by her husband Thorwald (John Douglas Thompson) and his protestations.

Maggie Lacey and John Douglas Thompson

This is always a challenge in A Doll’s House. The audience must feel that Nora’s departure—the rupturing of the middle class family unit—isn’t just plausible, but unavoidable. This production pulls it off but there is a slight shift in perspective in the final seconds. Rather than end the production with Nora slamming the door—presumably leaving the doll’s house for good—Arbus has her children, Ivar and Emmy (Ruben Almash and Jayla Lavender Nicholas), appear in the room to face the abandoned Thorwald.

The question of how a man like Thorwald could adapt to single parenthood might be an interesting one for modern audiences but it feels like a slight disservice to Ibsen’s vision, even if it isn’t the same ‘barbaric outrage’ that he complained of when A Doll’s House was adapted for the German stage. (In the German alternate ending Nora gives up her newly gained sense of personhood when confronted with the realities of her maternity).

The subplots didn’t quite have the impact they did in the previous A Doll’s House I was lucky enough to see—the Young Vic’s acclaimed 2013 production. Here, Dr Rank (Nigel Gore)’s impending death seemed something of a side note and the rekindling of Krogstad (Jesse J. Perez)’s relationship perfunctory. Yet overall TFANA’s A Doll’s House is well worth seeing. The leads are strong, the production is well designed, the colour-blind casting of a nineteenth-century play is a breath of fresh air and the spirit of Ibsen’s drama is undeniably captured.

A Doll’s House will be performed at TFANA until June 12^th—you can purchase tickets here.

Do you know of any NYC productions you’d like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: Munch and Expressionism, Neue Galerie, New York City

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is one of those artists whose works, at first glance, seem too modern to have originated in the nineteenth century. His 1893 The Scream (in fact several slightly varying compositions in different formats, several of which were on display in this exhibition) seems prescient of the spirit of the twentieth century and maybe even the twenty-first, given the high levels of interest and cultural capital it still commands.

The Scream, Edvard Munch (1893)

Munch was a Norwegian painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the Symbolist movement. He also had a profound influence on contemporary German and Austrian Expressionists. This relationship forms the basis of the Neue Galerie’s current exhibition, which comprises of 35 paintings and 50 works on paper, largely by Munch but also featuring Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Egon Schiele and others.

Two Human Beings The Lonely Ones, Edvard Munch (1896)

Putting Munch into dialogue with these artists helps create a clear place for him within the history of twentieth-century art, removing his slight outlier status. It’s clear to see how Munch’s innovations with wood cuts and printmaking translated into the works of his Austrian and German counterparts, but also too how the same concerns, philosophical and emotional, are the bedrock of both.

Model by the Wicker Chair, Edvard Munch (1919-1921)

Loneliness for me was the foremost theme of the exhibition, even more so than existential angst. Munch’s figures are irreparably apart even when pictured together. Two Human Beings The Lonely Ones (1896) depicts a man and woman staring out at the sea, united in their isolation. In his Model by the Wicker Chair (1919-1921) the separation is between the painter (and by extension the viewer) and the model, her eyes downcast, a human being less vibrant than the colourful furniture.

Street, Dresden, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1908)

In Kirchner’s famous Street, Dresden (1908) there is the loneliness of the modern cityscape, a theme Munch also plays with in his Angst (1894) images (although here his figures inhabit Oslo), and that inspires Ludwig Meidner in his I and the City (1913), a self -portrait set against the chaos of a kaleidoscopic cityscape.

I and the City, Ludwig Meidner (1913)

The ultimate loneliness of death is present, even in depictions of youth, such as his 1894-1895 Puberty or in his shocking Madonna lithograph (1895-1902), where a skeletal looking foetus cowers in the corner of the sperm patterned border.

Puberty, Edvard Munch (1894-1895)

Munch shines brightest in the exhibition despite the inclusion of major works by other artists, but there’s much to see here beyond The Scream. The exhibition is open until June 13 and is a wonderful opportunity to see some iconic works in person and discover much more to Munch and artist who’s lifetime and career spanned significant portions of two centuries.

Madonna, Edvard Munch (1895-1902)

Can you recommend an NYC exhibition for the Secret Victorianist to review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Theatre Review: Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen, Bottoms Dream, Theater 54, New York City

The first time I saw Henrik Ibsen’s 1890 Hedda Gabler on stage was at the Old Vic in London in 2012. And it’s hard to imagine a starker contrast than between that traditionally staged and sumptuously costumed period production and Bottoms Dream’s studio performance, which I attended at Theater 54 in New York the other week.

This Hedda Gabler (adapted by Caitlin White) is stripped down, with only four characters, and performed in an intimate space with the audience surrounding the performers. Sara Fay George, as Hedda, spends much of the play writhing around the floor between scenes, playing with a pistol and acting out the drama unfolding in her subconscious. The subtleties of Ibsen give way to overt commentary on the lack of options open to the two women, Hedda and Thea (White), which is difficult since the costuming (by Mary Rubi) suggests a later, mid-twentieth-century setting.

The actors also seem inconsistent in their approach, as if there are some who do think they’re performing in a naturalistic production. Doug Durlcacher as George plays the role of the clueless husband quite predictably but comes into his own in the final scene as he and Thea reconstruct Eilert’s lost manuscript. Nat Angstrom meanwhile does a good job in capturing the character’s charisma.

Director Kevin Hollenbeck has chosen to put this Hedda Gabler in conversation with another perennial nineteenth-century favourite—August Strindberg’s 1888 Creditors (you can read my review of another NYC production of Creditors here). In this case, the two plays are performed back to back.

I only joined for the Ibsen play, but it’s easy to see the parallels two. Strindberg actually accused Ibsen of plagiarism in 1891, saying ‘Hedda Gabler is a bastard of Laura in The Father and Tekla in Creditors’. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might have been better to let the plays speak for themselves, rather than exposing the parallels through the stylised sequences between scenes.

Do you know of any plays currently being performed in New York that you think the Secret Victorianist should see? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

Theatre Review: Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen, Almeida Theatre, London

Poster images for Ghosts

One preoccupation which has united all four performances of Ibsen plays I’ve been lucky enough to see over the last year or so has been an obsession with space. There was the revolving set for The Doll’s House at the Young Vic, which meant that Nora was always on view and her home life seemed set up and unreal; there was the gradual compression of the stage in the production of The Enemy of the People I saw in Dublin, which helped create an atmosphere of domestic and political oppression. And in Hedda Gabler internal glass partitions and doors allowed us to penetrate deeper into the home and continue to watch behind closed doors. 

This production of Ibsen’s 1881 Ghosts at the Almeida took this last idea and developed it even further. Tim Hatley’s design allowed us to see into the room beyond that of the main action, and so watch the ghostly echoes of the past play out, and also at times the world outside the Alvings’ house. Peter Mumford’s clever lighting  meant at times these divisions were transparent, at others reflective, creating atmospheric shadows and adding to the increasing doom. By the time Mrs Alving, Regina and Oswald sit over their champagne, the stage is in darkness, lit only by a single lamp. And Oswald’s final plea ‘Give me the sun’ is fulfilled in a blaze of red light which replicates perfectly a beautiful, if terrible, dawn.

Richard Eyre’s production doesn’t just look wonderful. The cast is strong and well-chosen. Lesley Manville’s Mrs Alving is entirely believable – strong but suffering, damaged by her past but still capable of moments of passionate hope and longing. The scenes between her and her son (Jack Lowden) were among the most affective, playing well with physical distance and blocking, and showcasing Manville’s acting at its most reactive. Charlene McKenna brings something fresh to the Regina role, which I think can come off in some productions as a little superficial when compared with the other characters. As she is here, Regina is simply youthful, but while given to these childish flights of fancy, is ultimately practical and highly capable – ‘worthy’ of the trust Oswald wished to place in her and similar in her pragmatism to her ‘father’ (played here by Brian McCardie).

Photograph from Ghosts - Hugo Glendenning

Only Will Keen’s Pastor Manders comes off as a little cardboard-cut-out but this is the fault of the adaption, not the actor. Eyre’s script seeks clarity and followability but one problem it risks is that the Pastor appears to be wrong headedly conservative, and is subject to the full force of twenty-first-century liberal censure from the audience accordingly. As Manders seems to be the butt of a joke relying on hindsight, the moral complexity of his position (as much as Mrs Alving’s) becomes ignored. 

There were other instances where the script seemed overstated or choices questionable – e.g. the certainty of the consensual nature of the Captain’s relationship with the maid, and the use of explicit statement where inference seemed apt. But these questions were just observations about the production I would have loved to have discussed with the director/adaptor, rather than hindrances to the enjoyability of the play.

All considered, this is a great production, which is cleverly conceived, cohesive in its design and brilliantly executed - well worth watching.

Have you seen Ghosts at the Almeida? What did you make of it? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Theatre Review: An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen, Gate Theatre, Dublin

Henrik Ibsen is one of those writers you can cite when people don’t believe nineteenth-century literature is relevant to today. ‘Look!’ you can cry, ‘political commentary, analysis of gender constructs, even discussion of venereal disease!’ But the problem with director Wayne Jordan’s production of An Enemy of the People at the Gate Theatre in Dublin is that it hammers home this relevance at expense of all else. Further difficulty is caused by the fact that the text used is Arthur Miller’s translation from the 1950s (the period suggested by Paul O’Mahony’s set and Joan O’Clery’s costumes). What exactly is the analogy here? Between fin-de-siècle Norway and Miller’s America in the time of McCarthyism? Or the latter and modern Ireland in the wake of financial crisis, ‘an inconceivable time when the many must take the consequences for the risks taken by a few’, as the director notes?

The Secret Victorianist goes to An Enemy of the People

 An Enemy of the People (1882) is the story of a man, Dr Stockmann, who thinks there is a problem with the water supply to the town’s therapeutic baths. His brother, Peter, who is Mayor, is worried about the economic impact of such a theory becoming public knowledge and so sets out to silence him.

The decision to highlight the play’s Scandinavian setting despite the obvious Americanisation of Miller’s script – on a linguistic and ideological level – was always going to be problematic and the result was a curious blend of preachiness and overstatement, which I hadn’t found in reading Christopher Hampton’s wonderful translation, with confusion as to what the play was actually preaching. Denis Conway’s Peter Stockmann was very much the villain to Declan Conlon’s heroic Dr Stockmann in a move which robbed Ibsen’s play of much of its subtlety and moral subjectivity. The journalists Billing (Mark Huberman) and Hovstad (Ronan Leahy)’s sexual interest in the doctor’s daughter Petra (Jill Harding) was also made much more overt from the outset, making the later revelation of their ulterior motives much less shocking and decidedly predictable.

Declan Conlon and Denis Conway in An Enemy of the People

 Throughout there was a feeling of being spoken down to, in a way which had much less to do with the original play I think, than with staging and delivery. It wasn’t only during the climactic town meeting that the audience felt lectured, and here our alignment with the crowd, as the citizens moved amongst us, felt ill thought through as the paucity of actors made their attack on the doctor far from intimidating. The irritating scene changes, in which suited men and women moved furniture officiously while glaring out at us against the noise of static interference on a radio, also felt heavy-handed, as the clever device by which the set increasingly narrowed the stage space available would have been enough to indicate the family’s increasing entrapment.

With a strong cast (particularly Bosco Hogan as Morten Kiil and Barry McGovern as Aslaksen), the whole production felt a little like a missed opportunity and it was disappointing that the implications of certain directorial decisions seemed to have been ignored. The successful commentary on women’s exclusion from political questions which earlier scenes in the Stockmann household had raised for instance was undercut by having one of the vocal citizens at the meeting be a woman. And the potentially fascist direction in which the doctor’s belief in a superior elite took his speech felt hurried over and unexplored, as the production celebrated his revolutionary spirit entirely uncritically.

Sheridan Smith in Hedda Gabler

 After seeing two wonderful Ibsen productions in London in the last year – A Doll’s House at the Young Vic and Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic – I was a little disappointed. If you want the real deal, and to appreciate Ibsen’s unflinching moral complexity, this play is one to read, and probably not in Miller’s translation. 

Dominic Rowan and Hattie Morahan in The Doll's House

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