Does Crow’s Theatre have another hit with this bleak, timely and muddy political melodrama?

The last couple of Crow’s Theatre season openers have been massive hits, with productions of “Uncle Vanya” (2022) and “The Master Plan” (2023) going on to win awards, and receive extensions and remounts.
It’s hard to imagine something similar happening with their 2024-25 season opener, Duncan Macmillan’s 2019 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” although like those earlier productions it’s directed with care and precision by Crow’s artistic director Chris Abraham.
Ibsen’s rarely produced work has a thorny ambiguity that makes it hard to connect to emotionally.
At the centre of the play is John Rosmer (Jonathon Young), an aristocratic former pastor who inhabits his Norwegian town’s gloomy manor, Rosmersholm (it translates as “Rosmer’s home”).
As with Ibsen’s more famous play “Ghosts,” several spirits haunt the abode. A year earlier, Rosmer’s wife Beth committed suicide in the mill river outside the home; the chair in which she sat and looked out at the mill remains seemingly untouched. Dark oil portraits of Rosmer’s ancestors line the walls above the risers where the audience sits. And characters talk of ghosts of the “white horses,” which apparently appear before a Rosmer family member is about to die.
So: not a happy place.
A spirit of change is in the air, however. The play opens on the eve of a national election. Defending the old guard is the conservative Governor Andreas Kroll (Ben Carlson), the brother of the late Beth, who desperately seeks the influential Rosmer’s support. Championing the left is Peter Mortensgaard (Beau Dixon), the publisher of a local newspaper that espouses reform and radical ideas.
And then there’s Rebecca West (Virgilia Griffith), the play’s most intriguing figure. She has lived at Rosmersholm for a while, first as a sort of companion to Beth and then, after her death, as a platonic friend and confidante of Rosmer. As a woman, she’s unable to vote herself, but surely she can persuade him how to act.
Much of the marketing of this production has been about the timeliness of the themes, with a polarized electorate voting in a big national election to our south and our own just around the corner.
It’s hard not to feel the play’s resonance when Kroll sarcastically says, “Elections used to be won by those who spoke with the most sense, not the most volume.”
But it’s the characters’ wrestling with their ethical and moral dilemmas that take up the most oxygen in this two-hour production. And it’s here that the play, despite contemporary playwright Macmillan’s efforts, lets us down.
Rebecca’s history, and her interactions with both Beth and John Rosmer, seem shrouded with mystery. Her connection with publisher Mortensgaard also seems unnecessarily vague. She was a character who fascinated Sigmund Freud, but it’s unclear what her psychological background means in the context of this play. Perhaps if there were some obvious physical sparks between Rebecca and Rosmer, that would add another dimension.
Still, even if Macmillan’s adaptation teeters between melodrama and morality lecture, Abraham gives the production lots of energy and urgency. Propelled by a steady hum in Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design, the actors burst onto the playing area with purpose and determination.
Young, looking elegant and suitably aristocratic in Ming Wong’s well-tailored costumes, is thrilling as a man who’s found a new purpose in life, while Griffith, forceful and grounded, makes her every pronouncement convincing. Carlson and Dixon are suitably single-minded in their political obsessions, while Diego Matamoros breezes through the play as a radical, mooching writer and Kate Hennig plays the family maid, Mrs. Helseth, with a watchfulness and sense of propriety.
The production’s most effective elements, however, come from the designs. Joshua Quinlan’s set is dominated by a set of French doors in one corner that let in the ever-shifting light designed by Kimberly Purtell and Imogen Wilson. Thanks to Payne’s evocative sound design, it really does seem like a rushing river is steps away.
Characters appear from different areas of the theatre, and there’s even a change of scene from a parlour to a bedroom that imparts a sense of this house’s size and scope. Since the play’s title refers to a home and not a person, that’s only appropriate.
It’s just too bad the drama at the centre of the production isn’t as exquisitely detailed as the design.