A guest production from Greece itself. That must be good. It was there the whole thing started with the Dionysian fertility rituals 2500 ago. This is something they know, I thought as I sat down to watch I kiara apo ti thalassa, or The Lady from the Sea, which is the domestic title variation. But then Eirik Stubø is the director, I remembered. His staging methods are so cerebral. They speak to the knob, but virtually neglect the rest of the body’s senses. It came to a peak with his Rosmersholm which opened the Ibsen Festival in 2008. It was like watching a chess game where the actors moved in geometrical patterns. Chess can be art, by all means, but not dramatic art. It was boring.

John Gabriel Borkman is intensely preoccupied with ore. It’s the first and the last thing he talks about in the play carrying his name. In the scene where he is introduced, he compares Frida Foldal’s piano playing with the notes of the singing ore down in the mines. In the last scene, seconds before he dies as an icy hand of iron grips his heart , Borkman talks about "the earthbound millions; I feel you, veins of ore, stretching your sinuous arms out to me, pleading, longing." I’ve made myself a litmus test for productions of John Gabriel Borkman. A production is good according to the degree to which it manages to make the ore in the play sing. Does Schaubühne’s version directed by Thomas Ostermeier succeed? Not really.