Reconsideració d'un dramaturg català: el teatre ideològic d'Henrik Ibsen a Llibertat! de Santiago Rusiñol

Abstract

In this article I suggest that Santiago Rusiñol's Llibertat! explores a theatre of ideas and current affairs which resonates with Henrik Ibsen's. Through it, the conflicts and the message of Rusiñol's play denounce the mediocrity and bourgeois intolerance of his society. It is not correct to frame Rusiñol's theatrical aesthetics solely within symbolist theatre, as many critics do; instead, it must be seen as an appropriation of Ibsen's ideology in order to rethink how Rusiñol's play has been categorized by the critics in the last few decades. The stress on ironical distancing, the individualization of the characters and the specificity of the kind of society portrayed are the characteristics that reveal the influence of the aesthetics of Ibsen's theatre of ideas. Rusiñol uses irony and parody in order to show the status of Ibsen's man: from man to the universe and society, like a divided soul. Rusiñol's is a social drama that fulfils the expectations people had of him that he would renew Catalan theatre.