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Theatre Review Ducking painful truths

TOM KING sees a thought-provoking adaptation of an Ibsen classic

The Wild Duck
Almeida Theatre, London

AT THE beginning of a production which doesn’t have a fourth wall to break and under the Almeida’s stark house lights with the audience still chattering away, props are solicited from its members and an actor emerges from our anonymous ranks.

“This is a true story,” we're told as Kevin Harvey wanders onto the stage. Somewhere in between himself and his character Gregory Woods, he considers the narrative. Can it ever be accurately told? Can facts be liberated from fictions? Should they? He thinks so and sets out to do just that.

Woods is heading back, after many years away, to a dinner party at the house of his wealthy father Charles (Nicholas Day). On his return he meets his childhood friend James Ekdal (Edward Hogg) and they catch up.

Photographer Ekdal is married to Gina (Lyndsey Marshall), a former servant of the Woods family and they have a daughter Hedwig (Clara Read). Living a poor but happy life in their shabby townhouse alongside his father Francis (Nicholas Farrell), all is well, you might think.

But we learn, as the actors divest themselves of their characters and address the audience directly on mics, that nothing is as it first appears. Gregory, haunted by the ghosts of his past, is eager to rescue James from the fiction of an existence which is gradually and painfully revealed throughout.

He embarks on a quest, to him a noble one, of establishing the truth behind the “alternative facts” of his old friend’s ignorant and sheltered life. Unsurprisingly, the revelations are not well received.

As we learn more about the two families — of their acrimony, jealousy and lust — the tension builds as the characters wrestle each other for the mic, eager to give their version of events and to tell us the stories they tell themselves — the stories we all tell ourselves — to soften reality’s crushing blow.

Such meta-theatrics make us complicit in this unfolding drama of the unintended consequences of ignorance and deceit in what's a highly impressive adaptation by Robert Icke of Henrik Ibsen’s play.

Runs until December 1, box office: almeida.co.uk

 

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