REVIEW: Rosmersholm - Seercraft

ROSMERSHOLM

Presented by: SEERCRAFT

Venue: Albert Street Uniting Church

Date attended: 19 September 2026

Written by: Henrik Ibsen

Translated by: Charles Archer

Directed by: Silvan Rus

Sound Design / Organ: Silvan Rus

Photography: Benjamin Prindable Photography

“The mind is a queer thing.”

SEERCRAFT stages Henrik Ibsen’s 1886 psychological drama inside Albert Street Uniting Church, and the building immediately becomes part of the action. I spend the evening surrounded by towering organ pipes, pews, and religious architecture, as though I’ve arrived for a very formal wedding. Then a woman veiled in black walks down the aisle and suddenly it’s giving Corpse Bride.

Rosmersholm is the ancestral home of Johannes Rosmer (Dudley Powell), a widowed former clergyman whose wife, Beata, died before the events of the play. Rebecca West (Meg Bowden), formerly Beata’s companion, has remained and is now effectively the lady of the house. Rosmer has left the church and adopted progressive views, much to the horror of his old friend and brother-in-law, Rector Kroll (Silvan Rus). What follows is a dense tangle of politics, guilt, attraction, manipulation, and family reputation.

Albert Street Uniting Church is an inspired place to put it. Rosmer can reject his inherited faith all he likes, but director Silvan Rus keeps him trapped inside the architecture of it. Family name, morality, religion, and tradition press inward. Rus plays the organ before and throughout the performance, its sound swelling through a space built to carry it. The piano and organ open Act Two with a morbid quality, like the soundtrack inside Rebecca’s head as life at Rosmersholm begins coming apart. The reverb is gorgeous. The pews are not. Bring a cushion. Your bum WILL hurt.

Dudley Powell gives Rosmer an approachable warmth that makes his deterioration difficult to watch. He spends much of the evening one distressing revelation away from tears, and as Beata’s private suffering comes into focus, that fragility escalates into full-blown panic. Rosmer has convinced himself that his bond with Rebecca is innocent, even describing it as a “spiritual marriage”. Discovering what his wife believed forces him to rethink the quiet, lonely battle she may have been fighting while he remained oblivious beside her. Powell absorbs each fresh accusation as though it might finally explain everything. Having rejected one moral certainty, Rosmer is desperate to find another. Guilt gets under his skin and stays there.

Powell’s scenes with Meg Bowden are strongest when their behaviour contradicts all that talk of purity. In one exchange, they remain physically separate while Powell circles Rebecca, follows her movements, and watches her with unmistakable desire. Their conversation circles just as stubbornly. These are two people who can discuss the nature of their bond for paragraphs at a time and somehow leave it murkier with every sentence.

“Do not speak in riddles!”

Bowden first presents Rebecca as warm, capable, coy, and adept at making herself welcome in Rosmer’s home. You understand why he trusts her. She has influenced him deliberately and, at least initially, used that influence in pursuit of her own ideas about status and progress. Whether every action is malicious is harder to pin down, because the woman who starts with a plan develops feelings inconvenient enough to wreck it.

As the pressure around Rebecca builds, Bowden’s composure begins to splinter. Confidence gives way to fear and desperation, while her excitement when Rosmer offers her the future she had been steering him towards is complicated by everything she is hiding. She can be elated one moment and cornered the next, each shift registering across her face and body before Rebecca finds the words for it. The visual irony sharpens when she exchanges her heavy black dress for white in Act Two. White might suggest innocence or renewal, except by then the supposedly blameless household is becoming harder to defend.

Silvan Rus plays Kroll as initially playful and enjoyably opinionated. His friendship with Rosmer feels authentic enough that their later screaming match hurts beyond the political disagreement. They’re two old friends discovering that they no longer inhabit the same moral universe, both shouting at what may as well be a brick wall. Kroll is also willing to tell Rosmer things nobody else will. “You blind, deluded dink!” may come from nineteenth-century Ibsen, but it lands with modern bluntness.

Rus changes tack completely with Rebecca. Their earlier interactions carry a comfortable familiarity; later, every scrap of her charm has been reclassified in Kroll’s mind as evidence of manipulation. “Whom could you not bewitch if you tried?” he asks as their exchanges harden into verbal sparring. Bowden’s fear, Rus’s rage, and Powell’s despair collide as the accusations spill into the open.

Alexis Beebe as Madam Helseth spends much of the play looking quietly concerned by the behaviour of everyone around her. Naturally, the maid knows everything. Rebecca skilfully draws gossip and history from her, including Rosmersholm’s peculiar household traditions: children apparently don’t cry, people rarely laugh, and sightings of white horses are regarded as omens. A cheery place, really.

Robert H. Wainwright doubles as Ulrik Brendel and Peter Mortensgård. Brendel arrives as a ruined but wildly earnest idealist in need of clothes and money, still clinging to grand ideas despite having very little left to offer. There’s desperation in his conviction that he still has something important left to give.

Mortensgård is far more controlled and calculating. As a newspaper editor with political interests of his own, he speaks with greater restraint, and Wainwright’s stillness and intense gaze give him a quiet authority. His shift between the two roles is sharp, particularly when Mortensgård arrives with information that drags Beata back into the conversation. Though never seen, Rosmer’s late wife exerts enormous control over the play. The woman whose suicide he has long linked to what he saw as an irrational state of mind begins to look disturbingly perceptive.

The production asks patience from a contemporary audience. Charles Archer’s translation is wordy, and there are stretches where the characters discuss politics, morality, motives, and one another at considerable length. The repetition can slow the tension, particularly in a venue where physical comfort isn’t exactly helping concentration. By the time the characters reach their final decisions, everyone has talked themselves into such a spectacular moral corner that what follows prompts a groan from me. It is all VERY tragic.

For my first encounter with Ibsen, though, this is theatre unlike much I’ve seen before. SEERCRAFT uses the church aisles and different levels around the altar well, while the pipe organ deepens the gloom until the whole thing feels almost ceremonially doomed. Rosmer spends the night trying to escape inherited religion and the ghosts of his past while standing beneath an organ inside a church. He never really stood a chance did he?

There are no tidy moral lessons or comforting happy endings here. Ibsen strips away respectable appearances until his characters are left facing the secrets and lies underneath them. I’m very glad this was my introduction to his work.