John Gabriel Borkman

John Gabriel Borkman is the penultimate play of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in 1896.

Plot

The Borkman family fortunes have been brought low by the imprisonment of John Gabriel who used his position as a bank manager to illegally 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 battle over the future of young Erhart Borkman. Though John Gabriel Borkman continues the line of naturalism and social commentary that marks Ibsen's middle period, the final act suggests a new phase for the playwright, a phase brought to fruition in his final more 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 play is based on an incident that Ibsen recorded from an earlier period in his life, the attempted suicide of an army officer who had been accused of embezzlement.^{[citation needed]}

Revival

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.^[1][2] The play had previously been performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1928.^[3]

In 2011 the production moved to New York and received mixed reviews.^[4]

References

External links

• John Gabriel Borkman at Project Gutenberg
• John Gabriel Borkman at Project Gutenberg (Esperanto)
• John Gabriel Borkman at the Internet Broadway Database

This article on a play from the 19th century is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e