John Gabriel Borkman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Gabriel Borkman is an 1896 play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was his penultimate work.
The Borkman family fortunes have been brought low by the imprisonment of John Gabriel who used his position as a bank manager to speculate with his investors' money. The action of the play takes place eight years after Borkman's release when John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs. Borkman, and her twin sister Ella Rentheim fight over young Erhart Borkman's future. Though John Gabriel Borkman continues the line of naturalism and social commentary that marks Ibsen's work over the preceding thirty years, the final act suggests a new phase for the playwright which was brought to fruition in his final symbolic work When We Dead Awaken.
Characters
- John Gabriel Borkman
- Mrs. Gunhild Borkman
- Erhart Borkman, their son
- Ella Rentheim, Mrs. Borkman's twin sister
- Mrs. Fanny Wilton
- Vilhelm Foldal
- Frida Foldal, his daughter
- Malene, housekeeper
Background
The Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht stated that the play could have been based on an incident that Ibsen might have recorded from an earlier period in his life around 1851, the attempted suicide of an army officer who had been accused of embezzlement.[1]
Revival
In 1925 Eva Le Gallienne produced, directed and performed in a successful run of the play in repertory with The Master Builder at the Princess Theatre, New York City. This was a critical step in her creation of the Civic Repertory Theatre in 1926.[2][3]
In 2010, a revival of the play was performed in the Abbey Theatre as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. In a new version by Frank McGuinness directed by James Macdonald, it featured actor Alan Rickman as John Gabriel Borkman, Fiona Shaw as his wife Gunhild and Lindsay Duncan as Ella.[4][5] The play had previously been performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1928.[6] In 2011, the production moved to New York and received mixed reviews.[7]
