The Enchantment

Zubin Varla and Nancy Carroll in The Enchantment

Those wanting to clock the moment when a fine, hard-working actress positions herself as a star will want to beat a hasty path to The Enchantment, a little-known Swedish play from the 1880s that has arrived at the National at just the moment to give NT regular player Nancy Carroll her long-overdue shot at the big time. Carroll plays Louise Strandberg, though any similarity in surnames between that and a certain noted male dramatist of the age is surely coincidental. When first seen, she's reclining in a Paris flat recovering from typhoid, the pale-faced embodiment of someone to whom life hasn't been especially kind. Her father died when young Lou was only a teenager, prompting her sister's subsequent move to an asylum and followed in due course by the death of her mother, too. Her tightness is there to be glimpsed in a hair bun that—as with so many erotic awakenings—exists to be undone, an act Louise experiences in the company of the sculptor Gustave Alland (Zubin Varla), who has returned to rule the Parisian artistic roost after an absence of two years.

You don't have to speak the words Hedda Gabler or Miss Julie, two plays that the onetime critic and theatre editor Clare Bayley's deft version of Benedictsson's script directly anticipates (Hedda, especially), to foresee that all may not go well. As played by Varla with a misty shimmer fleetingly visible behind severe eyes, Gustave trades in aphorisms, many of them of a grim-seeming kind. "Time heals all things," he says, sounding every bit a veteran of someone who knows a thing or two about what it's like to wound. And scarcely has Gustave clutched the black-clad Lou in a crushing embrace before he remarks, "Love doesn't last. You, too, will hate me one day"—if only she could take his prophesy as read. The play's other dominant female role, a neighbouring artist/friend of Lou's called Erna, finds new levels of flintiness in Niamh Cusack, here joining sister Sorcha (The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder) and partner Finbar Lynch (The Hothouse) in an informal family takeover of the National Theatre acting roster. Her eyes flashing with direct, clearly brutal recall of the abrasions visited upon her by Gustave in her time, Cusack joins Carroll for a thrilling face-off late in the first act that is this play's direct equivalent to the fractious exchanges between the erotically charged sisters of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, another slice of the Scandinavian canon to which The Enchantment pays anticipatory heed.

Nancy Carroll in The Enchantment

The director, Paul Miller, finds the contemporary bite in a period piece that eluded him earlier this year with the Menier Chocolate Factory's Total Eclipse, and he and a gifted company glide right through the riper passages of the text and some fairly pained exposition. "You know very well it's your birthday," one character unpersuasively remarks to another at the top of the second act. The narrative shifts for one of its four scenes to Sweden, the garden view toward the rear of Simon Daw's elegant, carefully appointed set replaced by a rain-soaked backdrop to Louise's talk of the troll world by which she has become bewitched. Does she really love Gustave, or has she been possessed by him? The question lingers in an exchange between the two in which they seem to be responding to mutually exalted visions of one another, much as if Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra had been displaced to a realm where you half expect Louise to start rhapsodising about Eilert Lovborg and the vine leaves in his hair. (Flowing tresses, indeed, help define the photographic nude on view against the back wall, an image both of sensuality and distress.)