No one ever said Ibsen was fun.  People who have never seen or read an Ibsen play find the word “gloomy” springing to their minds when they hear his name.  And yet the audience laughed several times on the night I saw John Gabriel Borkman, one of his last plays, at the Bridge Theatre.

Here’s another paradox. Ibsen, a Norwegian, has been dead for more than 100 years, yet John Gabriel Borkman feels utterly up-to-date.   It’s about the sort of person that commits complex financial fraud, the way they lie to the world and to themselves, and destroy their families.  The closer you are to a Bernie Madoff, a Charles Ponzi, a Ken Lay, an Elizabeth Holmes, the more you are damaged by them.  Ibsen understood that.  Yet he was dead before the world had heard of any of these great swindlers.

Ibsen’s Borkman, once a famous businessman, went to prison for fraud, and was released eight years before the play opens.  He has stayed upstairs all that time, in the house he shares with his estranged wife – the house that is owned by his wife’s sister, which is how it was kept out of the hands of Borkman’s creditors.

Borkman, like Madoff, Ponzi, Lay and Holmes, still maintains he did nothing wrong.  He paces his room and plans a comeback which anyone in touch with reality can see is a chimera.  

Simon Russell Beale is just right as Borkman – squat, untidy, self-absorbed, self-righteous, his failure to understand that other people are real and have feelings is made believable because it is so casual.   One of the loudest laughs of the evening follows his casual assertion to a woman who loved him that “women are interchangeable.”