This article examines John Gabriel Borkman’s neo-aristocratic performance of power and authority in Ibsen’s eponymously titled play (1896). After his downfall, John Gabriel has retreated into his ...once grand reception hall wherein he has become like a petrified relic from a preceding era. His performance within the “fading glory” of the upstairs hall– a veritable theatre for his delusions of grandeur – is one of an outmoded type of bourgeois “hero” whose flagrantly illicit dealings are no longer tenable as capitalism becomes ever-more “rational” and bureaucratic in its façade. The article focuses on John Gabriel’s performance of a “sovereign” or charismatic authority and examines his future visions as “manifestos”. The manifesto is a form belonging to a feudal era of rule by divine right – one that is necessarily “theatrical” in its performance of a legitimate authority. Assuming the voice of the sovereign, John Gabriel attempts to address the needs of the iron-ore miners – a desiring, albeit latent force in Ibsen’s text. The desires of the workers, however, are continually effaced by the bewitching powers of capitalist abstraction, which account for the alienation of family and individuals in Ibsen’s play. Comparing John Gabriel’s manifesto with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto not only accounts for the end of an age of neo-aristocratic bourgeois decadence, but also marks labour as the definitive socio-political issue of the late 19th century. Where John Gabriel uses a dramaturgy rooted in past models of rule to address the workers in his vision of a benevolent “kingdom”, the Communist Manifesto heralds the death of his class and replaces the voice of the “sovereign authority” with the self-authorising voice of the workers themselves. Borkman’s fatal flaw then is failing to sufficiently address the plight of the iron-ore miners with whom he claims intimate acquaintance but with whom he is grossly out of touch. Ibsen shows us his inevitable failure and the disappearance of the John Gabriel “type” of Romantic industrialist in favour of corrupt lawyers such as Hinkel, who are more adaptable to capitalism’s ever-changing incarnations.
En 2008, el director alemán Frank Castorf puso en escena una adaptación de la novela de Eduard Limonov Fuck Off, Amerika, publicada en alemán en 1979, y conocida en español como El poeta ruso ...prefiere a los negrazos. La novela de Limonov escandalizó a la audiencia con su descripción del exceso y nihilismo capitalista mediante la detallada narración de las aventuras de un disidente soviético en Nueva York. La adaptación de Castorf se alinea con la crítica de Limonov de los proyectos socialista y capitalista por igual, y refuerza la tendencia política de su propio teatro, el Volksbühne de Berlín. La producción se centra en Eddie, el protagonista de la novela (un álter ego de Eduard Limonov), y se potencia a partir de la biografía real de Limonov como líder del extremista Partido Nacional Bolchevique ruso. Tanto Castorf como Limonov delinean las fantasías ideológicas de los antiguos regímenes socialistas como performance postsocialista de la política. Como esta representación se basa en la participación política de Limonov en zonas de guerra y conflicto reales, ambos artistas utilizan métodos cuestionables para señalar aquellos territorios geopolíticos donde la «americanización» y el neoliberalismo no se han establecido con firmeza. De esta forma, la producción representa un intento de perpetuar la lucha contra la «colonización» occidental del antiguo este, que tuvo su máximo apogeo en los años inmediatamente posteriores a la caída del muro de Berlín.
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