Directed by
Will O’Mahony
Cast:
Zoe Morgan – Mitchell James – Sebastian Belmont – Gulliver McGrath –
Harry Pearce – Madeline Dona – Emilia Corlett
Ellida is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play, The Lady from the Sea, which he wrote in 1888, just before he returned to his native Norway after a quarter-century of self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany.
Sandwiched as it was between his most enduring works, A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder, it has never been highly regarded, and, in truth, the reasons for its relative obscurity are easy to see.
The issues of societies transitioning into modernity and, especially, the position of women in them are there as they are in his greatest plays. But despite the psychological realism that made his works the model for playwrights from Strindberg and Chekhov to Miller, O’Neill and beyond, The Lady from the Sea’s comparative two-dimensionality and its sudden and melodramatic denouement consign it to the second rank of Ibsen’s work.