Ibsen: Three Plays E-Book

Henrik Ibsen

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 372

Beschreibung

'I'm going to find out – which of us is right, society or me.' Henrik Ibsen's three great 'problem plays', A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, challenged the conventions of nineteenth-century society and sparked a revolution in European theatre. Their female protagonists, Nora Helmer, Helene Alving and Hedda Gabler, continue to exert their power over modern audiences. This volume brings together all three plays in sensitive and playable translations from the original Norwegian, along with a full introduction to Ibsen, his times and his work. The Drama Classic Collections bring together the most popular plays from a single author or a particular period. They offer students, actors and theatregoers a series of uncluttered, accessible editions, accompanied by comprehensive introductions. Where the originals are in English, there is a glossary of unfamiliar words and phrases. Where the originals are in a foreign language, the translations aim to be both actable and accurate – and are made by translators whose work is regularly staged in the professional theatre.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Key Dates

Further Reading

A Note on Stage Directions

A Doll's House

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Ghosts

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Hedda Gabler

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Henrik Johan Ibsen: a Brief Overview

When Ibsen was 23, he was appointed writer-i­n-residence at the newly-established Norwegian National Theatre in Bergen. Six years later he was made Director of the Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania (now Oslo), a post he held until 1862.

Ibsen found his years in the theatre intensely frustrating. The towns were small and the audiences parochial and frivolous-minded. His own plays at the time were chiefly historical dramas, some in verse, modelled on those of Shakespeare, Schiller and Hugo. In the end, the Norwegian Theatre lost its audience, ran out of money, and in 1864, after two years of poverty (aggravated by alcoholism and depression), Ibsen left Norway for Italy and Germany, countries in which he spent the next 27 years.

The first two plays Ibsen wrote in self-imposed exile, the verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), established his repu­tation. With characteristic iron will, however, he immediately changed his style. He dropped verse for prose (which was more suitable, he said, for ‘serious subjects’) and, from 1877 onwards, wrote no more plays on historical or folk-inspired subjects. His subsequent plays (a dozen from Pillars of the Community, 1877, to When We Dead Awaken, 1899) all dealt with contemporary social or philosophical issues, and were set among the provincial bourgeoisie. They regularly caused scandal, and took time to find favour with critics and the middle-class audiences whose lives and concerns they dramatised. Other critics (notably Archer and Shaw in Britain) rallied to his cause, and by his sixties (the time of his greatest plays), he had become the grand old man not only of Scandinavian literature but of European theatre in general. The ‘problem play’ of which he was a pioneer has been a staple theatre genre ever since.

Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. He wrote four more plays, but in 1900 suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes, the last of which proved fatal.

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)

Henrik Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828 in Skien, a small town to the south of Kristiania (modern Oslo), into a prosperous middle-class family. His mother, Marichen, took a lively interest in the arts, and Ibsen was introduced to the theatre at an early age. When he was six, however, his father’s business failed, and Ibsen’s childhood was spent in relative poverty, until he was forced to leave school and find employment as an apprentice pharmacist in Grimstad. In 1846, an affair with a housemaid ten years his senior produced an illegitimate son, whose upbringing Ibsen had to pay for until the boy was in his teens, though he saw nothing of him. Ibsen’s family relationships in general were not happy; after the age of twenty-two, he never saw either of his parents again and kept in touch with them only through his sister Hedvig’s letters.

While still working as a pharmacist, Ibsen was studying for university, in pursuit of a vague ambition to become a doctor. He failed the entrance examination, however, and at the age of twenty launched his literary career with the publication in 1850 of a verse play, Catiline, which sold a mere fifty copies, having already been rejected by the Danish Theatre in Kristiania. Drama in Norwegian, as opposed to Swedish and Danish, was virtually non-existent at this time, and the low status of the language reflected Norway’s own position, as a province of Denmark, for most of the preceding five centuries. Kristiania, the capital, was one of Europe’s smallest, with fewer than 30,000 inhabitants, and communications were primitive.

However, change, as far as the theatre was concerned, was already under way, and Ibsen and his younger contemporary Bjørnson were among the prime movers. Another was the internationally famous violinist, Ole Bull, who founded a Norwegian-language theatre in his home town of Bergen, and invited Ibsen to become its first resident dramatist in 1851, with a commitment to write one play each year, to be premièred on January 2nd, the anniversary of the theatre’s founding.

During his time at Bergen, Ibsen wrote five plays, mainly historical in content: St. John’s Night, a comedy which he later disowned, loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Warrior’s Barrow, a reworking of a one-act verse play first staged in Kristiania; Lady Inger of Østråt, a five-act drama set in 16th-century Trondheim, on the theme of Norwegian independence; The Feast at Solhaug, which went on to be commercially published; and a romantic drama, Olaf Liljekrans, to complete his contractual obligations in Bergen.

Ibsen had meanwhile met his future wife, Suzannah Thoresen, and the offer of the artistic directorship of the newly-created Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania must have been very welcome. Ibsen took up this post in September 1857, with a specific remit to compete for audiences with the long-established Danish Theatre in Kristiania. A successful first season was accordingly crucial, and his own new play, The Vikings at Helgeland, set in 10th-century Norway, and based on material drawn from the Norse sagas, was an important contribution. By 1861, however, the Danish Theatre was clearly winning the battle, in part by extending its own Norwegian repertoire, and Ibsen’s theatre was forced to close, in the summer of 1862.

Now unemployed, Ibsen successfully applied for a government grant to collect folk-tales in the Norwegian hinterland. During this period he also wrote Love’s Comedy, a verse play on the theme of modern marriage, and a five-act historical drama, The Pretenders, now regarded as his first major play, premièred at the Kristiania Theatre in January 1864, under Ibsen’s own direction. A few months later, financed by another government grant, Ibsen left Norway for Copenhagen on 2 April 1864, beginning a journey that would take him on to Rome, and international recognition.

Brand, the first fruit of Ibsen’s self-imposed exile, sees him aban­doning historical themes, and drawing on his own experience more directly, basing his uncompromising hero on a fanatical priest who had led a religious revival in Ibsen’s home town of Skien in the 1850s. Like all of Ibsen’s plays, Brand was published before it was staged, in March 1866, and received its first full performance almost twenty years later, in 1885 at the Nya Theatre in Stockholm, though it seems clear that like his next play, Peer Gynt, Brand was intended to be read, rather than acted.

Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in Rome, Ischia and Sorrento, through the summer of 1867, using material from Asbjørnsen’s recently published Norwegian Folk-Tales, as well as the darker corners of his own life, but the end result is regarded as containing some of his finest dramatic writing, with the irrepressible Peer at the other end of the moral spectrum from Brand, a typical example of Ibsen’s fondness for opposites or antitheses in his dramatic work.

The following spring, Ibsen left Rome for Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, to work on a new play, The League of Youth, which was premièred at the Kristiania Theatre in October 1869, and attracted some hostility for its satirical portrayal of contemporary politicians. A few weeks later, Ibsen travelled to Egypt, to represent his country at the official opening of the Suez Canal.

On his return, Ibsen began work on what he regarded as his greatest achievement, the mammoth ten-act Emperor and Galilean, dramatising the conflict between Christianity and paganism, through the life of Julian the Apostate. Published in Copenhagen in October 1873, to critical acclaim, the play nonetheless had to wait over a century before it was staged in full, an eight-hour marathon in Oslo in 1987.

By this time, Ibsen’s fame had brought him tempting offers to return to Norway, as well as recognition at the highest level in the form of a knighthood, of the Order of St Olaf. However, apart from a brief sojourn in Kristiania in the summer of 1874, he remained in Germany, moving from Dresden to Munich the following year, to commence writing Pillars of the Community, com­pleted in 1877, the first in a series of ‘problem’ plays, although its large cast requirements make it nowadays some­thing of a theatrical rarity. By contrast, his next play, A Doll’s House, has seldom been absent from the stage since its Copenhagen première in December 1879, and the challenge it offers to male hypocrisy and so-called ‘family values’ has ensured its continuing popularity.

In Ibsen’s characteristic manner, Ghosts in effect is the obverse of A Doll’s House. Whereas in the latter play Nora flees the family home, in Ghosts Ibsen shows the tragic consequences of a wife’s failure to break free from a disastrous marriage. Its exposure of taboo subjects like venereal disease, however, still retains the power to shock, and it was at first rejected by all Ibsen’s preferred theatres. After publication in 1881, almost two years elapsed before Ghosts was staged in Scandinavia, the world première having already taken place in Chicago, in May 1882.

Ibsen was angered by his countrymen’s reception of Ghosts, so that An Enemy of the People, with its ill-concealed attack on the Norwegian establishment, is, to an extent, a vehicle for that anger, as well as for Ibsen’s sceptical views on democracy. The play thus offended liberals and conservatives alike, but not enough to impede its staging; it was premièred in Kristiania in January 1883, to mixed reviews.

The initial reaction to The Wild Duck, published in November of the following year, was largely one of bewilderment, although it was produced without delay in all the major Scandinavian venues. While the ‘original sin’ of the drama, the housemaid made pregnant by her master and married off to a convenient dupe, echoes that of Ghosts, Ibsen’s use of symbolism appeared to sit uneasily with the naturalistic dialogue, and indeed still troubles modern audiences.

However, Ibsen was moving away from the concerns of the ‘problem’ play towards a more personal, oblique utterance, and the controversy which dogged his work scarcely lessened with the publication of Rosmersholm, in November 1886, following a brief return to Norway, after an eleven-year absence. Partly inspired by Ibsen’s disillusionment with Norwegian politics, it is especially noteworthy for the creation of Rebecca West, one of his most compelling characters, though its witches’ brew of ingredients caused something of a scandal.

Ibsen’s reputation was by now unassailable, however, and in Germany particularly, the innovative productions of the Saxe-Meiningen company had won him an eager following. In England, the enthusiasm of Edmund Gosse, and later William Archer, ensured that several of his plays were at least available in print in translation, but the first significant staging of his work in London had to wait until June 1889, with the Novelty Theatre production of A Doll’s House.

Meanwhile, The Lady from the Sea fared well enough at the box office, with simultaneous premières in Kristiania and Weimar, on 12 February 1889, though again its complex amalgam of dreamy symbolism, evolutionary theory, and the daily routine of the Wangel household in northern Norway, tended to confuse audiences and is still something of an obstacle to production.

Hedda Gabler, premièred in Munich at the Residenztheater in January 1891, is now Ibsen’s most popular play, but attracted fierce criticism in its day, largely on account of the character of Hedda herself. Arguably Ibsen’s finest creation, Hedda’s contempt for the sacred roles of wife and mother seemed the more offensive in that Ibsen provided no explanation for it, no inherited moral taint, and she continues to unnerve us even today, like a glimpse into the abyss.

In that same year, 1891, there were no fewer than five London productions of Ibsen plays, including Hedda Gabler; and the publication of George Bernard Shaw’s seminal critique, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, helped assure his place in the permanent English repertoire. Ibsen himself finally returned to Norway in July, a national hero, though he suffered the indignity of hearing his achievement disparaged by the rising young novelist Knut Hamsun, at a public lecture in October.

In his declining years, Ibsen increasingly sought the company of young female admirers, and his relationships with Emilie Bardach, Helene Raff, and finally Hildur Andersen, find their way into his later plays, notably The Master Builder, in which Ibsen also revisits the theme of self, which had inspired his early master­pieces, Brand and Peer Gynt. The burden of fame, the generational conflict between age and youth, Ibsen’s personal concerns, are all explored in the relationship between the successful middle-aged architect Solness and the twenty-something ‘free spirit’ Hilde Wangel. Although the all-pervasive tower metaphor puzzled some critics, given that Freud had still to explain such things, the play was an instant success, going on from its première in Berlin in January 1893, to productions in Scandinavia, Paris, Chicago and London within the year.

Ibsen’s next play, Little Eyolf, despite having the distinction of a public reading in English, at the Haymarket Theatre in December 1893, even before it was published in Copenhagen, has enjoyed little success on the stage, where its mixed modes of realism and symbolism can fail to blend, with unintentionally comic results. However, John Gabriel Borkman, published three years later, and premièred in Helsinki in January 1897, achieves in prose the poetic grandeur of Brand. The play is drawn in part from Ibsen’s own experience of humiliating dependency, in the wake of his father’s financial ruin, and explores Ibsen’s cherished themes: marital disharmony on the one hand, and, on the other, the cor­rupting influence of materialism, personal freedom and self-doubt.

Ibsen was now permanently resident in Kristiania, venerated wherever he went, and his seventieth birthday, on 20 March 1898, was the occasion for widespread rejoicing. His col­lected works were in preparation in both Denmark and Ger­many, and his international fame rivalled that of Tolstoy. It is fitting, there­fore, that Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken, should have been premièred on 15 January 1900, in effect launching the next century, at Kristiania’s new National Theatre, the confident expression of that Norwegian identity which Ibsen and Bjørnson, whose statues graced its entrance, did so much to promote.

Finally, like almost all of Ibsen’s plays, When We Dead Awaken is a response to the author’s psychic needs, part confession, part exorcism. It can be argued that the ageing sculptor Rubek’s return to his first inspiration, Irene, now confined in a sanatorium, represents Ibsen’s feelings of guilt over his neglect of his wife Suzannah, and his belated acknowledgement that she had been the real sustaining force behind his work. The tone of When We Dead Awaken is accordingly elegiac, an appropriate coda to Ibsen’s long career. Two months later, in March 1900, he suffered the first of a series of strokes which was to lead to his death, in Kristiania, on 23 May 1906.

The ‘Problem’ Play and the ‘Well-Made’ Play

The ‘problem’ play was a response, in mid-19th-century Euro­pean theatre, to an upsurge in public discussion of ‘big’ social and philosophical issues. Favoured topics were the differing natures and social roles of women and men, family relationships, sexual behaviour, religion, politics and social ethics. The plays were set among ordinary, contemporary people, whose dilemmas onstage embodied the questions under discussion. The ‘problem’ plays of some writers – for example Bjørnson in Norway, Sardou in France, Grundy and Jones in Britain – were often creaking and contrived: sermons or newspaper leaders disguised as art. (Shaw coined the nickname ‘Sardoodledum’; Wilde memorably said, ‘There are three rules for the young play­wright. The first rule is not to write like Jones. The second and third rules are the same.’) But in other hands, notably Ibsen’s, concentration on character and on personal tragedy elevated the form. Even such preachy plays as Ghosts or An Enemy of the People make their impact through the vitality of their characters and situations rather than the underlying issues they address.

Rules for the ‘well-made’ play were formulated in France in the early 19th century, and quickly spread throughout Europe. They were as strict as those Aristotle laid down for ancient tragedy (see below). In a ‘well-made’ play, action should be organised in three sections: exposition of the central problem, alarms and excursions, dénouement. The plot should hinge on a secret or a dilemma which affects the main character; the audience should be allowed only hints and glimpses of this as the play proceeds, and all should be fully revealed only as the action moves towards dénouement. There should be reversal of fortune – ‘up’ in a ‘well-made’ farce, ‘down’ in a ‘well-made’ melodrama. And finally, settings, dialogue and behaviour should be contem­porary and conventional. Tens of thousands of ‘well-made’ plays were written, and most are justly forgotten. (Victorian melo­dramas are typical examples.) But in the hands of fine writers – Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias and Labiche’s farces spring to mind, not to mention Maugham’s or Rattigan’s plays in a later age – the recipe has led to masterpieces. ‘Well-made’ conventions, in whole or in part, were particularly useful to writers of ‘problem’ plays, whose effect on their audience depended, in part, on putting a spin on familiar-seeming characters and situations and on received ideas.

A Doll’s House: Moral Identity

Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, much of it in a holiday apartment in Amalfi; it was first published, and first performed, in December that year. From the start it attracted critical praise, and – rather more unexpectedly, perhaps, in view of the bourgeois nature of its audiences – full houses. Critics applauded its technical innovation, the way it gave tragedy a domestic setting, with no more than five main characters and an almost total absence of histrionics. It is impossible to say what drew audiences, though the fact that the ‘message’ of the play was much discussed, as if Ibsen had preached some kind of sermon about contem­porary life, suggests that this may have been at least part of what attracted people to the theatre or made them buy the printed text (a bestseller). Possibly also the racking-up of emotional tension, which is such a feature of the action, made its impression, so that word-of-mouth soon guaranteed the play-going public a cathartic, if uncomfortable, night out.

Right from the start, A Doll’s House has been the prey of people who saw in it confirmation of their own prejudices about society. Calvinists in Ibsen’s own country, and fundamentalist Christians of other kinds in the US, railed against its ‘denunci­ation of marriage’; women’s guilds were disgusted by its ‘laxity of language’, and by its depiction onstage of drunkenness, domestic wrangling and an extor­tioner with – horror of horrors – redeeming characteristics. The play’s supporters could be equally dogmatic. In particular, from Shaw onwards (in The Quintessence of Ibsenism) it has regularly been claimed as a major document of women’s emancipation, a trumpet-call to blow down the walls of Western, male oppression. It is still regularly overlaid with feminist interpretations, in both academic books and stage productions. Ibsen’s theme is emancipation, but his play is, so to speak, as much ‘peoplist’ as feminist. He is concerned that everyone, of either gender, should break free of conventional shackles and discover his or her own moral identity; however painful or destructive this process proves to be, Ibsen’s claim is that moral truth is always better than moral lie. Nora in the play may be the most spectacular adventurer along the path to self-knowledge, but she is by no means the only one. As the action develops, all the other main characters approach a similar point of discovery in different ways and from different directions, and make their own decisions about how that discovery will affect their future actions. (Only Helmer’s future action is left undecided; as the curtain falls he is at the very moment of self-discovery.)

Assertion of moral identity involves not rejection of the way other people treat us, or we them, but an examination of where we stand in relation to ourselves and others; the results of that examination may be revolt against the status quo, or acceptance, but the important thing, for Ibsen and his characters, is not the action which follows the examination but the moral purgation which precedes it. In 1880 the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, about to play Nora in the German première, refused to perform the original ending on the grounds that she herself, as a mother, would never desert her children as Nora deserted hers. Ibsen, unwillingly, wrote an alternative ending (in which Helmer persuades Nora to ‘think again of the little ones’, and leads her to the children’s door, where she collapses as the curtain falls). This subverts the entire point of the play, restores the status quo and destroys Nora’s moral character – something Ibsen acknow­ledged by describing it as a ‘barbaric outrage’ on the play, and which the actress admitted by dropping the ending as soon she could, in favour of the original.

Characterisation and Irony in A Doll’s House

The role of Nora is one of the most challenging and rewarding in all Ibsen’s work. In the first two acts she barely leaves the stage, and runs the gamut from simpering flirtation (ironically underscored by our knowledge that she is deliberately playing the part of a child-wife) to energetic hysteria. As the third act opens (after her strenuous dancing which ends Act Two) the actress has a respite offstage, before coming on to experience a seduction, a domestic quarrel and the total change of direction which has been implicit from the start but which now carries the action to its bleak conclusion. The volatility of the part is brilliantly offset by Helmer’s rocklike steadiness: his and Nora’s relationship is like a darkly tragic version of the vaudeville double act in which an anarchic, unpredictable comedian bounces off the ‘straight man’, whose assumption of control is constantly challenged but never abandoned. Ibsen trumps this by the ending: Helmer’s collapse, in terms of what he is, is a moment of moral self-discovery as huge, and as open-ended, as anything which happens to Nora in the play.

In 19th-century Scandinavian theatre companies of the traditional kind, there were five main performers. They took the roles, respectively, of Hero, Heroine, Confidante, Villain and ‘Fifth Business’. ‘Fifth Business’ brought about the dénouement of the action: either the hero’s or heroine’s recognition that he/she was careering to self-inflicted doom, or the revelation or incident which brought destruction or salvation from outside the characters. (If coincidence brought happiness at the end of a melodrama, that coincidence was manipulated by ‘Fifth Business’.) In A Doll’s House Ibsen uses all five of the standard categories, but all – and especially ‘Fifth Business’ – are fluid. Save in numbers of lines (not, of course, the least consideration in some acting-companies then, and now) Helmer is not exclusively the hero; Nora is not solely the heroine; the roles of villain, confidante and ‘Fifth Business’ circulate among the other characters. In particular, characters we initially think are ‘good’ are shown to have ‘bad’ qualities and motives, and vice versa. Mrs Linde’s motives seem confused and opaque, until she reveals that everything she does is the result of a process of self-examination (long past) similar to the one which Nora is currently undergoing and which Mrs Linde both encourages and compels. Krogstad seems a heartless villain until – melodramatically – he is ‘redeemed’ in Act Three and shown to have been acting, however wickedly, out of morally understandable motives. (This revelation is one of the least ‘prepared’ moments in the play, hardly forseeable from what we learn of Krogstad’s character and history in earlier scenes.) Rank is that favourite Ibsen secondary character, the apparently amoral, sardonic bystander – but in this play, he has a ‘terrible secret’ which explains, if it never excuses, his outlook on life, and which makes him a fascinating foil for Helmer’s apparently flawless rectitude.

If the details of Ibsen’s plot are occasionally melodramatic, his over-riding theme (moral self-examination) removes the play entirely from mechanistic cliché. The blurring and ambiguity of character (never features of melodrama) allow him a greater degree of irony than in any of his other plays. Almost from the beginning of Act One, we know that Nora is nursing a terrible secret, and that her behaviour with Helmer is desperate play-acting – a knowledge which is itself ironically undercut because she herself half believes in, and certainly assents in, the ‘reality’ of the part she plays. We know that Helmer’s unquestioning self-certainty is a house of cards, that Rank’s apparent bonhomie will have its darker side, that Mrs Linde has some hidden purpose in coming back to town. Above all, and although we know that Krogstad will not easily surrender his hold on Nora, we still know less than he does about his motives and his intentions, matters which are them­selves to change in view of factors of which he himself is unaware. The irony in A Doll’s House is on many interlocking levels, and it shifts as the action develops, creating and enhancing the play’s extraordinary psychological tension. Consistently, we are less intrigued by the characters’ motives and nature than by what they know, and by how soon and in what way they will find out more than they know. In his third act, Ibsen exploits this state of affairs between dramatist and audience to give his moral theme more power. Nora’s (apparent) volte-face is shocking because it is (apparently) unexpected; the irony is that it is inevitable, and predictable, almost from the opening line.

The Language of A Doll’s House

Ibsen was concerned, in his prose plays, to write the kind of language which ordinary people spoke in everyday life. (He objected strongly to ‘literary’ translations, insisting that the plays should be rendered as far as possible in the vernacular of the place and period in which they were to be performed.) A Doll’s House is remarkable for the ordinariness of its lan­guage. There are so few literary or histrionic flights that the simplest of meta­phors (the singing bird), the plainest of images (Krogstad’s vision of the ‘deep dark depths’ into which Nora may throw herself) or the briefest of fancies (Nora’s and Rank’s flirtatious – desperately flirtatious – discussion of the foie gras and oysters which may have comprised Rank’s father’s dissipation) all impact like bombs. Because voices are seldom raised, Nora’s hysteria at the end of the second act, and Helmer’s fury after he reads the letter, seem almost unbearably violent. Helmer’s attempted seduction, half a dozen lines of suggestion and murmur, shrieks, in context, like a scream in church. (This passage was one of those which provoked outrage among Ibsen’s more staid contemporaries.) The play’s impression of frankness comes not from the words spoken, but from the feeling that we are walking on the characters’ very nerve-ends, on the raw flesh of their relation­ships. When the characters in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger use baby-talk, it repels because we know they hate it; when Nora and Helmer use it, our horror is intensified because we know that they both believe, or wish, that it may be ‘real’. Without ever being overt, the play is consistently frank about matters which had never before been so laid out for public inspection. Before the spectators’ eyes, intimacy is violated – not the intimacy of Man and Woman in general, but the intimacy of one particular woman and one particular man – and this is why, even today, when Ibsen’s ‘messages’ have long been part of our emotional, psychological and dramatic baggage, A Doll’s House can still seem one of his most uncomfortable, most shocking and most moving plays.

A Doll’s House in Performance

Following its first performance, in Copenhagen in December 1879, the play was quickly taken up in Germany; it was performed in New York in 1882 and in London in 1884 – the first of Ibsen’s plays to reach America and Britain, in each case initially in an adapted and somewhat emasculated form; by the mid-1890s it was part of the international repertoire, a main cause of Ibsen’s worldwide reputation. The first English Helmer was Herbert Beerbohm Tree; distinguished British Noras have included Janet Achurch, Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies, Sybil Thorndike, Flora Robson and Claire Bloom (who filmed it in 1973 with AnthonyHopkins as Helmer and Ralph Richardson as Rank); distinguished American Norashave included Beatrice Cameron (whose production caused nationwide controversy in the late 1880s), Ruth Gordon (in an adaptation by Thornton Wilder) and Jane Fonda (in a 1973 film notable for its feminist emphasis).

Ghosts: Realism and Fate

While critical estimates vary, the consensus view of Ibsen’s Ghosts remains unchanged from that expressed by his Danish contem­porary Georg Brandes: it may not be his greatest work, but it is ‘certainly his noblest deed’. Ibsen’s awareness of the revolution he was about to make in European theatre is plain in his own comment about the necessity, as he saw it, of shifting the ‘boundary posts’ – not only those restricting what could be said in the theatre, but in what manner, and by whom. Ghosts, written in 1881 at Sorrento, where he had completed the equally daring Peer Gynt some fourteen years before, is thus the first modern tragedy, dealing with the lives of an ordinary middle-class family, and spoken in everyday prose.

Ibsen was also well aware that it would ruffle some feathers in his homeland, but he could scarcely have anticipated the violence of the reaction to Ghosts, from critics and public alike. Ibsen’s plays in general spring from a sense of ‘unfinished busi­ness’, and Ghosts was written in part as a response to criticism directed at his previous work, A Doll’s House, in which Nora Helmer, with the playwright’s implicit approval, abandons her husband and children. Ghosts shows the disastrous consequences of a wife choosing to stay.

Unfortunately, while critical reservations about A Doll’s House had very little impact on the play’s popularity, Ghosts was another matter entirely, and Ibsen’s publisher Hegel took a heavy loss on its publication. Ibsen was especially upset at being attacked by so-called ‘progressives’, who lacked the courage of their professed convictions, and who would become a target for his wrath in Rosmersholm, some years later. However, it is little wonder that Ghosts caused such an uproar, given the bleak picture Ibsen paints of the sacred institutions of marriage and the family, and its open discussion of the taboo subjects of ‘free love’, incest, and venereal disease, which Osvald, by implication, has inherited from his father.

In fact, despite what was perceived as its innovative and shock­ing naturalism, Ghosts rigorously observes the classical unities of time, place and action: the narrative, constructed for the most part as a series of debates, unfolds over a period of a day, in one location, the Alvings’ drawing-room, while the drama is sharply focused almost to the point of obsession. So far from being a ‘problem’ play, in which Ibsen exposes the social and physical ills of his day, Ghosts has more in common with Greek tragedy, in the sense that it demonstrates the inexorable workings of Fate, which no human intervention can reverse. Retribution, the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, is Ibsen’s recurring theme, with inherited character traits taking the place of divine wrath.

However, there are some difficulties with seeing Ibsen as a modern Sophocles, not least the relentless determinism of the characters’ situation, the outcome of which is arguably more depressing than cathartic. And indeed, interpretations which focus too strongly on the tragic destiny of Osvald, as did most earlier readings, run the risk of becoming static, especially in the latter part of the play. In more recent times, the emphasis has shifted to the theme of enlightenment, as personified in Mrs Alving’s spiritual journey from meek acceptance of that wifely duty which will ultimately destroy her child, through growing financial, intellectual, and moral independence, to a belated realisation of her own shortcomings, as the sun finally rises over the wreckage of her life. Mrs Alving must now confront that truth, towards which the play has been inching, in its full horror, but the choice she is left with – to kill or not to kill her son – is no choice at all, and it is no surprise that Ibsen himself declined to guess at what she might do, once decently screened by the final curtain.

Despite its reputation as the first great realist tragedy, Ibsen’s Ghosts has more than its share of artifice, and critics have not been slow to point out a number of flaws, e.g., Ibsen’s imperfect understanding of the nature of syphilis; Osvald’s risibly idyllic portrait of the artistic community in Paris; Manders’s too-easy acceptance of blame for the Orphanage fire; its fortuitous timing, just as Mrs Alving is on the point of revealing all, in the manner of a soap-opera cliff-hanger. More serious criticisms have been levelled at the characterisation: Pastor Manders at times seems more of a target for Ibsen’s anti-clericalism than a fully-rounded human being; Osvald, with his taste for strong drink and serving-maids, is a little too plainly the Captain’s son; and Regine also, with her easy virtue, Johanne’s daughter. However, it is hard to see how else Ibsen could have proceeded, in a play whose dominant theme, announced in its very title, is the influence of heredity, the dead hand of the past choking the natural life out of the present.

And Ibsen’s artifice extends to the creation of ‘reflections’, intensifying the effect of his theme: Manders’s hypocrisy is the more exposed in being contrasted with Engstrand’s, who could assuredly give the Pastor lessons in the art; Regine’s eventual return to the Engstrand family ‘home’, as it were, invites comparison with Osvald’s own home­coming, to a womb-like state of dependence. And despite the gulf that separates Engstrand and Mrs Alving, it may be asked whether, in some deep, dark recess of her being, Mrs Alving does not also achieve her desire, i.e., to possess her son utterly. We should not forget, moreover, that Mrs Alving’s original plan for Regine was to pack her off to a life of drudgery in the Orphanage, ridding herself of a living reminder of the Captain’s shame, while the bricks and mortar of his memorial performed the same function.

Ghosts, realism notwithstanding, is alive with symbols, actual and potential, ranging from Engstrand’s Oedipal deformed foot to the very light, or lack of it, by which we watch the action unfold. Its obvious parallels, coincidences, contrivances, may trouble the logical mind, but they result in an extraordinary degree of concentration and dramatic force. Thus the ‘convenient’ interruption of the fire, at the close of Act II, is not simply a crude device to hold off Mrs Alving’s climactic revelation; it actually is that revelation – the fact that Captain Alving’s public fame is a total sham – delivered wordlessly, as a powerful metaphor.

Among Ibsen’s most important contributions to European theatre is the multi-layered structure of his dialogue, in which the past, brought into the present by a series of carefully-timed revelations, exerts pressure not only on what is said, but perhaps more signi­ficantly, what is unsaid. Subtext is thus crucial to the under­stand­ing of Ibsen’s characters, and in Ghosts this is nowhere more obvious than in the relationship between Manders and Mrs Alving, as they negotiate their tortuous passage to mutual understanding, if not enlightenment. Without that sense of engagement on two levels, conscious and subconscious, in which the remembered, or indeed forgotten, past constantly works to re-position the present, the play is at risk of seeming mechan­istic, a grim moral fable on the sins of the fathers. That leaves out of account not only Ibsen’s humour, but also the genuine complexity of the characters. Pastor Manders may have all the stereotypical traits of his calling – naivety, pomposity, self-righteousness – but a charge of hypocrisy is hardly justified against a man who lives by his religious convictions, however absurd. Manders neither lines his own pocket, nor seduces his young parishioners, and he is certainly no Tartuffe. Moreover, Mrs Alving was, and perhaps still is to some extent, in love with him. Even the chief villain, Engstrand, deserves a fair hearing, and while Ibsen tells us nothing about the carpenter’s ante­cedents, we may guess that he would have needed a thick skin to survive the daily torment of married life with Johanne, bringing up another man’s child. The case-hardened Engstrand, indeed, may bear witness to the influence of environment, rather than heredity, on shaping character. And Mrs Alving, so often the focus of the play in the modern theatre, as she advances line by line to her final, terrible realisation, is by turns shallow and perceptive, strong-willed and pusillanimous, uncaring and compassionate, as changing circumstances dictate. However, the very contradictions in Ghosts are potentially a source of strength, keeping the play open to interpretation, and its characters essentially mysterious.

While Ibsen’s ‘noblest deed’ remains a puzzle in many respects, there is no denying its concentrated power, and the sense that the doomed Alving family, in their remote Nordic fastness, have something of permanent value to communicate to us about Ibsen’s society and our own – no longer shockable, it may be, but still under threat from the ‘ghosts’ of the past, dead conventions, hollow reputations, empty gestures.

Ghosts in Performance

In common with all Ibsen’s plays, Ghosts was published, in December 1881, before being staged, though the playwright’s hopes of profiting from the Christmas rush encountered a severe setback, and indeed the scandal provoked by its publication had a damaging effect on sales of all Ibsen’s work. The earlier performance history of the play is accordingly a catalogue of rejections, beginning with the prestige theatres in Scandinavia, the Royal Theatres in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and the Kristiania in the Norwegian capital. Ibsen was by this time very popular in Germany, but not until 1886 was Ghosts produced there, by the Saxe-Meiningen players at Augsburg. In fact, the very first performance of Ghosts took place in Chicago, on 20 May 1882, in Dano-Norwegian, with a Danish professional actress, Helga von Bluhme, and a scratch company of Scandi­navian immigrants. Its Norwegian première took place some eighteen months later, on 17 October 1883, at the tiny Møllergaten Theatre in Kristiania, a venue which Ibsen himself regarded as quite unsuitable, while the Kristiania Theatre, from which Ghosts was banned until 1900, performed a no-account French farce.

Interestingly, Ibsen’s great defender William Archer was in the audience for the Norwegian première of Ghosts, which gives his account of the press reaction to its first English staging an added piquancy. A year after Antoine’s famous Théâtre Libre boldly introduced French audiences to Ibsen with Ghosts, J.T. Grein’s one-off production at the Royalty Theatre in Soho on 13 March 1891, met with a positive torrent of critical abuse, which Archer wittily surveys in an article for the Pall Mall Gazette a few weeks later, titled ‘Ghosts and Gibberings’. The Daily Telegraph leader is perhaps the most damning, describing the play as: ‘an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house with all its doors and windows open’ while the reviewer in The Gentlewoman thought it ‘just a wicked nightmare’, and Ibsen himself: ‘a gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes.’

The general tenor of the five hundred-odd articles prompted by Ibsen’s masterpiece was sufficiently hostile to ensure that the play could not be performed in a public theatre in England until 1914, though there were some dissenting voices, among them the critic of The Star, who asked: ‘Have they no eyes for what stares them in the face: the plain simple fact that Ghosts is a great spiritual drama?’ But as Archer concludes: ‘Who can carry on a rational discussion with men whose first argument is a howl for the police?’

Slowly but surely, however, Ibsen’s great achievement in Ghosts came to be recognised, not least with the Berlin Freie Bühne production at the Lessing Theater in the autumn of 1890, which Archer claims to have inspired a new generation of German dramatists. In London, as the shock waves of the Royalty production gradually subsided, Ghosts came to be among the most performed of Ibsen’s plays, with the first licensed staging at the Haymarket in July 1914, initially promoted by a women’s suffrage group. Mrs Patrick Campbell and the young John Gielgud came together in a Wyndham’s Theatre production in March 1928, and, in a 1930 production at the Everyman, Sybil Thorndike played Mrs Alving, a role which Beatrix Lehmann filled at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1943, and reprised at the Embassy in 1951. Flora Robson played Mrs Alving to Michael Hordern’s Manders at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1959. Catherine Lacey, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1965, and Irene Worth at the Greenwich Theatre in 1974, brought their several talents to the same role, as did Jane Lapotaire with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican in 1994. If anything, productions of Ghosts have increased in frequency over the years, and hardly a theatre season passes without a fresh assault somewhere on Ibsen’s ‘noblest deed’. Radio, as early as 1934, found an audience for the play, followed in 1951 by the first of several television productions, notably that of 1968, directed by Michael Elliott, and starring Celia Johnson, Tom Courtenay, and Donald Wolfit. Ghosts was televised again in 1987, with Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Gambon. More recently, there have been new productions of Ghosts in 2001, at the Comedy Theatre in April, with Francesca Annis and Anthony Andrews, and on BBC Radio 3, in December, with Penelope Wilton, Paul Rhys, and Patrick Malahide. The translation in this volume was premièred, by English Touring Theatre, with Diana Quick as Mrs Alving, in February 2002.

Hedda Gabler: Formal Structure

Hedda Gabler was first staged in 1890. It deals with a favourite Ibsen theme, the conflict between individual spiritual freedom and the claims of convention and society. It resembles the plays which preceded it (Pillars of the Community, A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People) in that it is entirely realistic, tragedy in a domestic setting. (In fact domesticity is one of the main causes of the tragedy.) At the same time, it anticipates some of the symbolism and ‘otherness’ of such later plays as The Master Builder or Rosmersholm. There are times when it is not just to herself, but to the other char­acters and to us as well, that Hedda seems to come from a different planet from everyone else. Ibsen may have had this quality in mind when he talked of the play’s ‘demonism’.

Ibsen’s later plays are formally dazzling: tightly structured, without a loose end or a wasted word. But even among them, Hedda Gabler is exceptional. One of the most striking things about it is its harmonisation of the conventions of the ‘well-made’ play with a much grander set of ‘rules’: those deduced from classical Greek tragedy and noted by Aristotle. Hedda Gabler observes the unities: it happens in one place, in a single stretch of time, in a sequence of action which proceeds without inter­ruption or divergence from beginning to end. Characters and action are totally integrated: even Aunt Rina, lying unseen on her death-bed, plays a crucial role in the unfolding of events. The plot concerns a ‘tragic flaw’ in the leading character: a psychological failing, at first unperceived, which is gradually revealed and which engenders the character’s doom. That doom is inevitable from the beginning of the play, and is worked out inexorably before our eyes. There is a moment of recognition: a climactic point when the leading character realises that she is trapped by her own nature and actions and that her destruction is inevitable. The cathartic event of violence takes place offstage.

Aristotelian ideas influence the play’s structure as well as its themes. The characteristic organisation of structure in surviving Greek tragedy is an introduction and five sections, of which the last is a kind of extended musical ‘coda’. These are interspersed with choral sections which link, frame and counterpoint the main action. The five-act division of Renaissance tragedy probably imitated this pattern, without the choruses. In Hedda Gabler