Slow-Cooked But Delicious: The Wild Duck At The Almeida Theatre
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Last Updated 24 October 2018
Robert Icke clearly hopes to reinvigorate Ibsen the way he did for Shakespeare with the exceptional Andrew Scott Hamlet. His conversational, documentary production of The Wild Duck makes this complex morality play immediately accessible, starting with Kevin Harvey’s Gregers, a man of almost irritatingly attractiveness and open likability.
Harvey’s amiable lecturing seduces us into sympathy for the downtrodden Ekdal family, financially supported by his own father whose corruption and patriarchal immortalities include possibly impregnating Gina Ekdal, a role given new weight and agency in an excellent performance by Lyndsey Marshal.
In a really strong cast, special mentions go to Nicholas Farrell as ‘Old’ Ekdal processing complex injustices, alcoholism and pain, and Edward Hogg’s nervily insecure James Ekdal moving anxiously and jokily from fond father to Angry Young Man.
The Wild Duck is about truth, and whether or not demanding honesty improves or wrecks the lives it affects. Icke’s method is to build the tensions really steadily and at nearly three hours, this is a slow-roasted duck.
But hang in there: after the interval everything changes — including a breathtaking reveal in Bunny Christie’s initially stark set — when the pieces of the on stage puzzle fit together in a truly electric conclusion.
Slow cooked, but, mmm, delicious.
The Wild Duck, Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, N1. Tickets £10-39.50, until 1 December 2018.