The Ingrid Bergman Tribute, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1

2/5

AUGUST 29 was the centenary of Ingrid Bergman’s birth and this one-off tribute to her was performed last Sunday by her daughter Isabella Rossellini and actor Jeremy Irons.

Touching home movies of the Academy Award-winning Swedish actor larking with her four kids and being simply a housemate were the background to a dramatically lit and elegantly minimalist show, mainly readings from Bergman’s account of her life and correspondence with the likes of Ernest Hemingway.

Rossellini’s beautiful voice, similar to her mother’s, made listening a joy.

But the creative team — Ludovica Damiani and Guido Torlonia, the latter also directing — missed an important opportunity to help the audience engage more.

Rossellini never actually conversed with the audience, let alone referred to her mother, in what came across as a carefully scripted summary.

For socialists, of course, the interest must lie in Bergman’s relationships with radical photographer Robert Capa and second husband Roberto Rossellini.

However Rossellini was mainly referred to as a jealous, controlling partner from whom she had to escape rather than as a seminal neorealist director with whom she grew as a political artist.

While tributes are necessarily positive — indeed rosy — accounts, they should raise questions too.

One is how someone so appreciated for her unpretentiousness and integrity could keep on refusing to become a smooth peg in the Hollywood-shaped hole and yet still get employed.

Instead this was a charming but ultimately rather anodyne and mannered version of a gritty life that deserves to be viewed through a more complex lens.