Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams in John Gabriel Borkman at the Bridge Theatre
(Picture: Manuel Harlan)Not even a trio of our finest actors, under the guiding hand of Nicholas Hytner, can bring to life this version of Ibsen’s penultimate play, in which three bitter characters operate at the same anguished emotional pitch throughout.
It may have been this work that inspired Somerset Maugham to say that all Ibsen dramas start with a stranger opening a window, and end when everyone subsequently dies of pneumonia.
