This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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John Gabriel Borkman is a prescient archetype for the scape-grace modern tycoon: a man dwelling with the shadow of past misdemeanors and the toll that discovery has taken on his family and former associates.

You can meet such men among New York financiers and tech titans or Me Too’d Hollywood execs and ousted media moguls penning memoirs of how badly they were treated for an accounting offence.

The contemporary echoes of reputation-crashing must surely have been the thinking of the Bridge Theatre’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner when casting as Borkman Simon Russell Beale, the most bankable star turn of the playhouse seeking to challenge the National Theatre on classical productions.

The themes of male grandiosity, suffering female sidekicks and the awe and threat of Scandinavian nature, are all well-tested

It is, however, also a hard Ibsen to like — and I speak as a fan of the great Norwegian gloomster — because it is his penultimate play and it feels like it. The themes of male grandiosity, suffering female sidekicks and the awe and threat of Scandinavian nature, indifferent to the fate of mere mortals are all well-tested by this point in Ibsen’s dramatic journey and the echoes of greater plays such as Hedda Gabler hang over the enterprise.

We meet late-middle-aged sisters (Clare Higgins as Gunhild, Borkman’s embittered, estranged wife, and Lia Williams as Ella Rentheim, her sister who was Borkman’s first passionate love and somehow escaped penury during his fall) swigging a lot of Coca-Cola from litre bottles, in front of a battered old flat screen TV. This indicates they have fallen on hard times, but it’s a stretch for Ibsen’s shabby, proud characters to rely upon on carbonated beverages and a cheap-looking Ikea sofa.

This brings us to Russell Beale, who plays vainglorious men from Timon of Athens to J.S. Bach with his trademark nervy aplomb. The risk is what you might call Single Transferable Beale Syndrome — a reduction of sundry roles to a fussing, fretting character, undone by obsession with power and oblivious to the effects on his family or acolytes.

Here, Gunhild hovers over her dreamy, feckless boy Erhardt, fixated on the hope that he will restore reputation to the family. Williams is excellent as her wraith-like, dying sister, a zealous deus ex machina, who precipitates the final round of trauma and crisis in the least happy house in Norway.

In a new-build courtesy of Anna Fleischle’s vertiginous modern design, “JG” (a nice updating of the personality cult indulged by people who love their initials) clumps around upstairs like one of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” in his own house — or rather, a dwelling funded by Ella, who has also come to extract her pound of flesh in emotional currency. Gunhild glowers and broods below, erupting from time to time in a geyser of anger and revenge.

It is a dance of death alright, which is the power of the play, but the tone is oddly insecure and the anachronisms jar. Michael Simkins as Borkman’s loyal clerk Foldal adds some dark comic relief as the persistent friend, though the addition of winter cycling wear looks more apposite to a trip across the Thames than freezing Scandinavia.

It is a dance of death alright, which is the power of the play

The giddy Fanny Wilton (Laila Rouass) who tempts Erhardt to the fleshpots of the town — and out of the flailing grasp of his family — is a nice counterpoint in her sexual freedom and irreverence to the constrained emotions all around her. It does not look like a relationship which will end happily, but as she suggests in a final flippant démarche, it may be better to be loved and lost in Rome than stuck with a repressive family in the northern hemisphere.

When Russell Beale heads out, deranged but defiant, into the snow, fulfilling the old quip that all Ibsen ends with a guttering candle and someone dying of pneumonia, we wish the cussed old thing a peaceful release but not with the depth of pathos or the sense of waste the author intended for a life which began with a quest for progress and prosperity and ends in self-destruction.

As we head towards the Christmas season finally unencumbered by the threat of Covid-related cancellations, Russell Beale will be back on stage at The Bridge as the great Bah-Humbug purveyor himself in A Christmas Carol, throughout December. And if you feel like splashing out on one of the West End’s priciest numbers, David Tennant takes the lead in Good at the Harold Pinter theatre. That is star power in economic action: ticket prices are well over £100 for what looks like a compelling revival of C.P. Taylor’s 1982 play about a liberal professor who is seduced by Nazism, and how far distorting ideologies can warp “good” people whilst also bringing to the surface underlying moral weakness.

We might feel relieved we have not been tested by dictatorships. I also bumped into Brian Cox, not yet done terrifying everyone as the thoroughly Borkman-esque Logan Roy in tv’s Succession, heading into its final fourth series. Cox loves the theatre, having graduated from LAMDA in 1965 and begun his trade at the Dundee Rep. The best part of six decades on, he is set to return to play J.S. Bach in a new drama for 2023. Finally, there’s competition for Russell Beale in the grumpy genius zone — and may the best cantata win.