113) The Enchantment, Cottesloe

I went to see The Enchantment at the Cottesloe with very few preconceptions. I knew next to nothing about the writer (apart from her name and nationality) or indeed about the play. Having seen it, on its final night, I find it hard to believe that this powerful play had to wait more than a century for its British premiere.

What was it about? It was about the eternal verities – love, betrayal, death. It was the story of a cold, calculating man who breaks a vulnerable woman on a wheel. And it also reflected the life and death of its author, the 19th-century Swedish novelist and playwright Victoria Benedictsson.

It was only from reading the programme notes that I realized that Benedictsson, entirely unknown outside Scandinavia, is a famous figure in her native Sweden. Louise Strandberg’s doomed relationship with the sculptor Gustave Alland is based on Benedictsson’s own affair with the Danish critic Georg Brandes, an affair which ended with Benedictsson slitting her own throat in a Copenhagen hotel room in the summer of 1888.

The play started confusingly enough. With several characters jostling on stage, mostly of a similar age and background, I wasn’t entirely sure of who was who and what their connections were. Things only started to become clearer with the appearance of the cynical and manipulative Alland and his ruthless entrapment of the hapless Louise. Her friend, the strong-willed Erna (played by Niamh Cusack who seems custom-built to toil in these bleak Nordic plays) – Erna struggles to steer Louise away from the trap, but her message doesn’t get through.

Even though the first half of the play was set in Paris, in its soul it was Nordic through and through. Whatever the season outside, the emotional weather inside was relentlessly oppressive. And with the impassive Alland on stage, I spent large parts of the first half squirming in discomfort, half in self-recognition. Have I really been all that better in my own life?

In the second half, Louise returns briefly to her rural Swedish home. It is here that the bleak Nordic tone takes over completely – the rain falls endlessly as it did in Ghosts, the wooden halls are vast and bare as they were in John Gabriel Borkman, the men and women are stiff and tortured as they are in Ibsen. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was an Ibsen play.

And so Louise spurns the approaches of a bourgeois bank manager, spouting some very perceptive lines about the nature of work and what it means for some men whose lives would be an unremitting misery were it not for the daily dose of amnesia that employment provides. I wonder how many people in that theatre felt a pang of recognition upon hearing those lines.

In Louise, Benedictsson also captures the dilemma of migrant people who have come back to their original parochial settings, and their urge to return to the wider world. The artists’ life shown in this play was what the syphilitic Oswald had experienced in Paris before returning to his homeland in Ghosts. Once you have seen Paris or London or New York, can you ever really return to Skane or Dhaka and be content?

Pa-ris! What those two syllables must have signalled to Europeans of the late 19th century, how they must have sounded like an invitation to a glittering Babylon. Maybe it had the same resonance back then as the word ‘America’ used to have with people of my generation when we were coming into adulthood. Benedictsson beautifully captures that yearning for the big wide world.

So in the end, Louise must return to Paris to meet her fate. As her creator cut her own throat, Louise drowns in the Seine – but not before she has achieved ultimate consummation with her tormentor. As her body was dragged back on stage, I sat there, stunned by the story unfolding, by the extremes of the human condition that love can drive you to. Even after a hundred nights at the theatre, an experience that close to the bone can leave you shaken.

The play was superbly acted across the board. Nancy Carroll shone in the central role, capturing Louise’s initial hesitation and high principles, and her helpless resignation towards the end. Niamh Cusack was there at the Gate in Ghosts, and now I’ve seen her again doing Benedictsson – like I said, she’s tailor-made for this kind of stuff. Zubin Varla was an interesting piece of work – as Alland, he was impassive much of the time, his bearded face immobile, only his voice betraying any emotion. He also had this interesting tic where his face twitched and his eyes blinked every time his encounters with Louise were reaching an emotional peak. Looming over all was an illustration in the background, projected on a wall - the crouching figure of a naked blonde goddess, part Ayn Rand, part Leni Riefenstahl.

All in all, a satisfying night at the theatre. The National delivered again.