That was what I thought when I saw that the Brooklyn Academy of Music was bringing John Gabriel Borkman from Dublin to be staged at the Harvey Theatre. I’d never heard of the play before, and to be honest, I’m not much of an Ibsen fan. I went to see it substantially because of the cast – Alan Rickman as Borkman, Fiona Shaw as his wife, Gunhild, and Lindsay Duncan as her sister, Ella, the woman he always really loved (assuming he ever loved anybody). The story is highly topical: Rickman is a Madoff-esque figure, a man of working-class origins who rose to a position of prominence in a bank, only to abuse his position, leading to the collapse of the bank and the ruin of his family. They are saved from destitution only through Ella’s timely intervention; she purchases the family estate with her own money, the only money that Borkman did not embezzle, and lets the family live there; meanwhile, as Borkman goes to prison and his wife goes temporarily off the deep end, Ella takes in their son, Erhardt.

All this is backstory; the play takes place thirteen years later. Borkman, out of prison, has spent the last eight years pacing the upper floor of the family estate, never going out, while his wife plots restoration of the family honor through saintly behavior by her son. Then Ella comes back, on the brink of death, to claim Erhardt’s allegiance for herself and finally tell off the man who jilted her so many years ago.

It’s a great story – melodramatic, yes, but with huge potential. I can see the movie. But the play is simply awful. Every single line of dialogue is smack on the nose. Whole conversations consist of nothing but ping-ponging expository paragraphs. Everybody tells everybody else exactly what they want – “I wanted power!” “My son’s mission is to restore the family honor!” “You committed the one unforgivable sin – you killed the love in me!” – and they say it over, and over, and over. When a big honking symbol is trotted out, Ibsen is careful to underline it multiple times, just to be absolutely sure we get it. Best example: Erhardt runs off to Paris with his older female lover and her younger assistant, who she is grooming to be his next lover; on the way out of town, their sleigh knocks down the young assistant’s father, who is hurrying to say goodbye to her. So we all know what happened. We all get it. But Borkman still has to tell us – to tell the girl’s father. Just in case he doesn’t get it. It’s just appalling. And it goes on.

Tom Pye has designed a beautiful snowbound set, snow inside as well as outside the house, and the acting is overall quite fine, particularly at bringing out the mordant laughter that the piece desperately needs. But it’s fine on a surface level. The depths, to the extent that we glimpse them, don’t actually line up with the story we are given. Borkman is supposed to be this titan of banking, genuinely convinced he is the one indispensable man – a “caged wolf” as his wife calls him. But there’s nothing vulpine about Rickman’s movements, and his assertions of his own significance come off as obviously deluded – not merely unaware that his time has passed (which it plainly has) but unaware that it never was his time in the first place, that he wasn’t all that, when, from the evidence we are given from the performance, he so plainly wasn’t. It’s actually quite an interesting character Rickman creates, but I can’t square it with what everybody is saying about him. The two sisters, Gunhild and Ella, meanwhile, are supposed to have been rivals for his love. He loved Ella, but because another man, a man he needed for advancement, loved her as well, he renounced her and married her sister. Presumably, her sister once had some desire for him. We see no sign of that anymore – not merely that the desire has turned to hate, no sign that the desire was once there. And, worse, we don’t see what Ella once saw in Borkman. “You killed the love in me” – fine, but I’d like to see the corpse.

Some of this I attribute as well to flaws in the play – why on earth would Borkman marry Gunhild after ditching her sister anyway? Are there no other women in Norway? Does he actually want to torture himself and both of them with this enforced proximity? But these are the kinds of questions that, if the text doesn’t give a clear answer, the director should endeavor to answer with the production. Find a subtext if you can, find one that isn’t there if you have to. But James Macdonald went the other way; leaning heavily on the repeated references to ice and snow in the text, he entombs his characters in their icy present so completely that we no longer see any signs of the fires that once burned in them. This doesn’t just make the play dreary rather than tragic – it undermines the story.

As I said, I’m not much of an Ibsen fan. Obviously he was of titanic historical significance, but I get hung up again and again on the writing. I wonder, in fact, whether the best way to bring new life to work like this might not be to translate it for the screen, where melodrama can thrive and where an adapter would have the license to slash away at those deadly hunks of exposition, and open the story up, visually.

By why bother making a movie of Borkman when The Mark Madoff Story has yet to be written (and no, this doesn’t count).