Imagine A Midsummer Night's Dream crossed with Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and you get some idea of the wonderful weirdness of this early 1851 play by Ibsen only now receiving its British professional premiere. But, although the author himself called it "a miserable thing" and never sanctioned its publication, it turns out to be highly playable in Anthony Biggs's production and full of intimations of the later, greater Ibsen.
The play's most arresting and original character is Poulsen: a pretentious poet and critic whose inherited nationalism is at odds with the aestheticism he has acquired as a student. Turning up in rural Telemark on midsummer night, he tells his hosts he has come to rediscover his primitive self in the rugged countryside, only to be reminded that he is actually sitting in a garden.
But Ibsen shrewdly blends satire with romance in a convoluted plot that sees Poulsen pairing off with his hostess's coquettish daughter while his friend Birk is united with her naive, Cinderella-like stepdaughter. In one crucial scene the two lovestruck couples gaze at an awesome midsummer night's spectacle in the mountains; and, in their wildly differing reactions, Ibsen shows, as he constantly did in his later work, how the claims of the ideal need to be balanced by a sharp dose of reality.
For all its absurdities, including a Puck-like goblin who provides a strangely gratuitous love potion, the play has an eccentric charm. Danny Lee Wynter is very funny as the posturing Poulsen, who sounds exactly like Gilbert's Bunthorne when he announces: "I am rarely happy for more than half an hour at a time." Isla Carter as his rural soulmate, and Louise Calf as her abused step-sister provide lively support. Given the fairytale nature of Sara Crowe as the wicked stepmother and the lurking presence of the supernatural, I am strongly tempted to rechristen this bizarre but highly watchable comedy, written when Ibsen was only 23, A Troll's House.
