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John Gabriel Borkman, once an illustrious entrepreneur, has been brought low by a prison sentence for fraud. As he paces alone in an upstairs room, bankrupt and disgraced, he is obsessed by dreams of his comeback.
Downstairs, his estranged wife plots the restoration of the family name. When her sister arrives unannounced, she triggers a desperate showdown with the past.
Henrik Ibsen's most contemporary play and his penultimate, John Gabriel Borkman is gripping, penetrating and savagely funny. This version by Lucinda Coxon premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London, in September 2022, directed by Nicholas Hytner, with a cast led by Clare Higgins, Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams.
"A staggering, dark portrayal of family dynamics that have been warped by misplaced values and the denial of love... full of difficult emotions and fierce feeling." —WhatsOnStage
"Weird, funny, bleak... a blackly humorous piquancy... [the play] has a whipsmart humour and wonderful momentum to it: a depiction of frozen lives finally experiencing one last calamitous thaw before the end of their days." —Time Out
"Riveting... a penetrating character study of highly flammable, alpha masculinity." —Guardian
"One of Henrik Ibsen's richest plays, full of penetrating sounds and images – and of writing that vaults... a remarkable study of a charismatic personality." —Observer
"Astonishing... the most dramatic passion we've seen on stage all year... Never a false note... shockingly funny... devastating one-liners... holds you riveted." —TheatreCat
Lucinda Coxon is an English playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: a version of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (Bridge Theatre, London, 2022); Alys, Always, adapted from the novel by Harriet Lane (Bridge Theatre, London, 2019); Herding Cats (Ustinov Theatre, Bath, 2010, & Hampstead Theatre, 2011); and Happy Now? (National Theatre, 2008). Her screenplays include The Danish Girl, The Crimson Petal and the White and The Little Stranger.
Born in Norway in 1828, Henrik Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic ‘problem’ plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes.