MARY OF THE SEA . 2015
THE SEA LADY
Fruen fra havet (1888)
by Henrik Ibsen
translated by
Pedro Fernandes / Livros Cotovia
staging Carlos Pimenta set design João Mendes Ribeiro costumes Bernardo Monteiro lighting design José Álvaro Correia video Alexandre Azinheira sound design Ricardo Pinto
acting
Emília Silvestre Ellida Wangel Jorge Pinto Dr. Wangel Alexandra Gabriel Bolette Isabel Queirós Hilde
Paulo Moura Lopes Professor Arnholm António Durães A Stranger
Luís Araújo Lyngstrand
Ivo Alexandre Ballested
staging and production assistance
Vânia Mendes (final year student at Escola Superior Artística do Porto)
For Ibsen, the very desire for a full and complete life appears guilty; guilty of not taking into account the truth, that is, the objective conditions that stand in the way of a person’s free unfolding. At the same time, Ibsen knows very well that this “megalomania of life” is necessary. In his last plays, individuals are faced with a terrible choice between two evils, between two equally tragic mistakes. […] He was a great poet of the malaise of civilization: he clearly realized that the civilization of his time was blocking the dream of a happy humanity reconciled with itself, that it was making this harmonious development unrealizable. And yet Ibsen pursues this dream from play to play, to the point of disillusionment. Long before Thomas Mann, he shows how vain is this effort that life makes to transcend itself and the impossibility of this transcendence. He tells of the barrier between the individual and life. – Claudio Magris – “Un écrivain laconique et terrible: une conversation autour d’Ibsen”. OutreScène. No. 2 (Mars 2003). p. 8.