Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism

Abstract

"Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism": The case of Henrik Ibsen demonstrates that, in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century London, the theatre acted as a central circulatory system for the ideas, practices, and aesthetic innovations that would later be described as modernist. The staging and reception of Ibsen's dramas was stormy. Both the playwright and his critics used the language of disease to describe one other: for critics, Ibsen's art encouraged degeneracy; for the playwright, late nineteenth-century middle-class life was sick and in need of a cure. As Ibsenism took hold, influential members of counterpublics took a direct hand in introducing, translating, parodying, performing, and reviewing his plays. Feminists, socialists, sexologists, and suffragists, among others, used Ibsen's writing to perform a break with tradition and clear a space for their vision of the future. Later artists, such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, would also be drawn to Ibsen as the inspiration for their aesthetic and political experiments. Not only in the West but also in China and Japan, the plays of Ibsen have appeared at moments of progressive upheaval to signal a rejection of the past and a suspicion of official culture. Ibsen's work and its uses demonstrate the full range of lived experience that defined modern rebellion, and it reminds us that theatre and drama played a central role in making that rebellion visible and available to a wide public.