Review: The Wild Duck

Tuesday 26th January-Saturday 30th January, ADC, 7.45pm, £6-9.

Directed by Adam Hollingworth

** and a half

Strangely enough, the prospect of a Tuesday evening with Ibsen didn’t cause my heart to sink with titanic proportions. Quite the opposite, I was looking forward to the opportunity of being poetically posed in my seat, gazing sophisticatedly out at the stage. I breathlessly stumbled into the ADC seconds before the lights went down. I was just in time to taste the makeshift moody atmosphere and join the audience drowning in the melancholic string music.

My anticipation deflated as quickly as a cheerless, off-white Poundland balloon and I felt distinctly underwhelmed. Despite the performance being on the whole solid, the acting was often wooden, and it seemed that the actors had difficulty in depicting the emotional complexity that the roles required. This is certainly a risk with amateur dramatics, though it was a noble effort and by the second half there were some major improvements. By this point, I felt that the extent of the characters’ unfulfilled lives and worn out hopes were suitably conveyed to the audience.

All of the performances were at times a little artificial, but each did have moments of success. Although he often bordered on the overtly patronizing, Amrou al Khadi’s Gregers was sometimes tinged with the blind idealism that the part needed. The tense father/son relationship with Ned Carpenter’s Werle similarly ached to materialize but often fell into the slightly deflated and tepid ‘teenager Vs dad’ category.  I found Charlotte Reid’s Hedvig a suitably endearing character, and despite sometimes verging on the Pollyanna, she never spilled out into pick and mix sickly sweetness. Overall I felt that her portrayal of childlike excitement combined with a certain haughtiness and maturity was a successful one. There were also positive moments in the relationship between Hedvig and her mother, Gina (Lowri Amies), in which they successfully conveyed their dependency on each other and their key mixture of optimism and discontent.

Photos Tim Johns – www.timjohns.co.uk

The second half was a great deal better after the shaky start, in which John Lindsay (in the role of Hjalmar Ekdal) particularly improved. However, there were some moments of what could have been unintentional comedy throughout the play. Naturally there were a few usual opening night mishaps, but often during some of the most tragic and dramatic moments of the play the audience did succumb to laughter. Sometimes this was due to the staging, but mostly to exclamations that seemed so out of place in the sombre setting.

Overall this is just what you would expect of a student production of such a work. The performances were consistent, even at times touching, but often fell short of the emotional intricacy that this play demands. I staggered out, a sense of existential dismemberment filling me to the core. I spent the remainder of the evening staring at my computer with blank apathy… It was just another angst ridden night in the life of a Tab reviewer.