A woman's lonely search for happiness mirrors the author's real-life tragedy
The Enchantment Cottesloe Theatre, London SE1
To watch The Enchantment, by the little-known, 19th-century Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson (in a version by Clare Bayley), is rather like experiencing a pendant to those famous, intense, proto-feminist Scandinavian dramas of the same era, A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler. Indeed, Ibsen's Hedda was apparently influenced by Benedictsson, a smart, educated woman who dumped her parochial life (and husband) for Stockholm's literary set, and who focused her small oeuvre of two novels and this play on exploring the possibilities for women in modern society.
Unlike the playwright herself, however, the heroine of The Enchantment is not focused on much in particular. Louise Strandberg (Nancy Carroll) admits she has no talents and no vocation. Away from her home in provincial Sweden, she is staying in Paris, recuperating from a recent illness on a chaise longue and sipping tea under the beady eye of her friend Erna (Niamh Cusack).
Naturally, this being the wicked City of Love, it is not long before the luminous Louise is having her hair loosened by the infamous womaniser Gustave Alland (Zubin Varla), who is also a famous Parisian sculptor. He would like, very much, to practise his theory of free love, with no commitments, on Louise. She falls for the dashing Frenchman, although she longs for something more lasting. It is a very modern play.
Erna, who has herself been dumped by Alland, and is now unhappily married, warns her friend against the cad ("He's been in hundreds of pairs of female arms"). But it is no good. Louise is smitten, and even a spell of self-imposed exile in rainy old Sweden can't dispel the yearning for her French lover.
With their bustles, long striped skirts and beribboned caps, the women in Paul Miller's production look as if they have stepped straight out of a Monet painting. Actually, the whole feel of The Enchantment is highly impressionistic, with bursts of live music from a string and wind trio, and a breezy feeling of fresh air and light, courtesy of Simon Daw's delicate, loosely defined set, which brings shimmering glass, cooing doves and a tree in full blossom to the Cottesloe Theatre. Not that these corseted, discontented women ever get a sniff of the fresh air; while Benedictsson's men are liberated, forever leaping on and off trains, smoking pipes and producing art, her women do nothing but angle for satisfactory men to marry. Only Louise's elderly landlady seems to have a life of her own.
Nancy Carroll brings a great deal of empathy to the role of Louise, a woman doomed only to receive the attentions of others, as she lacks the tools to define her own existence. "I want a man's work!" she cries at one point. "It can distract you from unhappiness." But no; as a middle-class, 32-year-old spinster with a small inheritance, all she can look forward to are "endless days and empty rooms" and the unwanted attentions of her elderly bank manager, who has been proposing to her on and off for years. In one startling scene, she paces the wooden floor of her Swedish house on her birthday, weeping. "I know all the different shapes of the emptiness," she says. Was grinding boredom ever more elegantly expressed?
Benedictsson's heroine is not an out-and-out radical. She wants marriage all right, but on equal terms, and to someone she loves. Alland's no-strings love won't do, but unfortunately the French rascal is the only man who makes her heart beat with passion. Something has to end up in the Seine, and, in the end, it's not Alland's sculpture, which he has modelled on Louise.
A sad postscript in the theatre programme tells us that after her second novel was rejected for review by her lover, the intellectual and critic Georg Brandes, Benedictsson went off to write The Enchantment, with its beautiful but aimless heroine. When she had finished it, she checked in to a Copenhagen hotel room and slit her own throat. This play was found after her death by her stepdaughter.
For booking details and further information log on to: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Pick of the week
The Bacchae
King’s Theatre, Edinburgh
Alan Cumming returns to his home country playing Dionysus in this new version by David Greig.
In Celebration
Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2
See Orlando Bloom up close in this Sixties drama about working-class parents and their middle-class sons.
In the Club
Hampstead Theatre, London NW3
Political farce by Richard Bean with the nimble comic James Fleet.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
