Out Of Time: John Gabriel Borkman and the End of Drama

Attending a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896) directed by Vegard Vinge and Ida M€ uller in Berlin in 2012 required one thing in particular: time. The show, which could last up to twelve hours, often started with a scene that was both simple as well as brilliant: dressed in a devil’s costume, Vinge counted up from one as long as he wanted while the spectators had to endure his tedious and indulgent counting, sometimes for more than an hour before something happened and the stage finally changed. With this beginning the main theme of the performance was firmly set: the experience of time. Vinge’s and M€ uller’s interpretation of John Gabriel Borkman, as radical as it was, seems logical as it takes up a commonplace in Ibsen studies. Since Peter Szondi, who explained the epic tendencies of John Gabriel Borkman as indicative of a crisis of the drama, time has played a decisive role in many other interpretations of the text. These include some interesting approaches that have refined and expanded one of Szondi’s main theses, namely that the analysis of the past fails in the play, since “it is not individual events that stand in the foreground, neither is it their motivation, but time itself” (Szondi and Hays 1983, 201). For instance, Fritz Paul conceives of time as a leitmotif of the text (Paul 1969, 80 ff.); Vigdis Ystad, referring to both Szondi and Paul, identifies “the mythology of time” as the real theme of the text (Ystad 1997, 56); Frode Helland’s investigation concludes without limitation that the play is “characterized by a stiffening of time” (Helland 2000, 303); Eli Park Sørensen shows that the text “explores the time after traditional drama has come to an end”