A new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s final play When We Dead Awaken by Mike Poulton is having its world premier on Wednesday 16 November at The Print Room, Bayswater. The play is called Judgement day and is directed by James Dacre
Written and first performed in 1899, When We Dead Awaken is one of Ibsen’s most extraordinary and deeply personal works, last shown in London in 1994. Set within a mythical Nordic landscape Judgement Day offers an explicit and merciless self-portrait of Ibsen as an aging artist: restless with his art, his homeland and his married life.
Judgement Day is play about art and artists. Its central character, the sculptor Rubek, exhibits all the extraordinary passion and fantastical drive that was an essential part of Ibsen’s own creative character. Whilst holidaying with his young wife, Rubek encounters his muse: a woman that he loved and left a lifetime ago. What follows is a heartfelt examination of how Rubek has used these two. Over a series of heated encounters, the entire scroll of Rubek’s life is unrolled in Ibsen’s final – and most autobiographical - exploration of what it means to love and to be loved. A study in the destructive power of the creative impulse, Judgement Day examines some of the strangest and most mysterious areas of human behaviour.
Judgement Day
16 Nov – 17 Dec
Mon-Sat at 7.30pm, Sat mats at 3pm (not 19th Nov)
The Print Room
34 Hereford Road
London W2 5AJ
Tickets: £20 (£15 concs)