Tropes Revisited: Evert Sprinchorn'sIbsen's Kingdom: The Man and His Worksand Recent Historical Research in Ibsen Studies

The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche

Ibsen, Power and the Self: Postsocialist Chinese Experimentations in Stage Performance and Film

Ibsen's apparently inexhaustible capacity for contradicting himself has sorely tried the patience of commentators and critics. Take, for example, the most characteristic of all Ibsen themes: the right of the individual to realize his self-so characteristic, that it has practically become synonymous with the name Ibsen. Yet just what is Ibsen's conviction on this question? Brand, written in 1866, is a vigorous denunciation of self-sacrifice and a plea for self-realization. Peer Gynt, which appeared the very next year, exposes the villainy of self-realization. A Doll's House, Ghosts, Rosmersholm advocate self-realization. But Pillars of Society, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler preach self-sacrifice.

Henrik Ibsen and Conspiracy Thinking: The Case of <i>Peer Gynt</i>

It is one of the least challenged suppositions of Ibsen criticism that Peer Gynt offers a satirical portrait of the titular hero's escapist flights of fancy.1 According to this canonical view, Ibse...

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is considered Norway's most distinguished playwrights, besides being the father of modern drama. He started handling realistic themes around the last quarter of the nineteenth century after he had given up writing romantic plays. He turned to the problem play with The Pillars of Society (1877) and kept tackling realistic subject-matters especially in A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and The Wild Duck (1884). In these particular plays, he relentlessly attacked the false values of society which made many people suffer. He used the prose dialogue in his realistic plays to replace the unrealistic elements of the previous romantic plays. In the realistic plays, Ibsen also subordinated action to thought since ideas are more important than action in this kind of drama. Thus, the action is more psychological than physical in A Doll's House, which is the central notion in this article. At the same time Ibsen's realistic plays came as a surprise to the people who were influenced by the existing conventions. It is no wonder that such plays were not appreciated by the censors and banned in some European countries, especially at the first time of their appearance. Ibsen surprised Europe when he volunteered to speak of subjects no other playwright dared to speak so openly and fearlessly. Thus Ibsen's Ghosts could not be staged in England until 1891, ten years after its introduction in Norway. It was J. T. Grein who helped to stage the English version of Ghosts in The Independent Theatre, a private theatre, in order to escape the censorship imposed on the public theatres. The play was already translated into English by William Archer. The subject-matter of Ghosts revolves on a hereditary issue when a son inherits a venereal disease from his father, and also on a conventional situation when a wife is forced to remain with an immoral husband whom she hates.

"First and Foremost a Human Being":Idealism, Theatre, and Gender in A Doll's House1 Toril Moi (bio) Introduction A Doll's House is the first full-blown example of Ibsen's modernism. It contains a devastating critique of idealism entwined with a turn to the everyday, a celebration of theatre combined with a fierce analysis of everyday theatricality (A Doll's House is teeming with metatheatrical elements) and a preoccupation with the conditions of love in modernity. In A Doll's House, Ibsen mobilizes all these features in a contemporary setting and in relation to a fundamentally modern theme: namely, the situation of women in the family and society.2 The result is a play that calls for a radical transformation [forvandling], not just, or not even primarily, of laws and institutions, but of human beings and their ideas of love. This article explores three major themes in A Doll's House: idealism, theatre, and gender. Although idealist aesthetic norms were a primary concern for many of the play's first critics, contemporary literary scholars have barely raised the subject.3 In this article, I use the term "idealism" to mean "idealist aesthetics," defined broadly as the idea that the task of art is to create beauty, combined with the belief that beauty, truth, and goodness are one. Taking questions of beauty to be questions of morality and truth, idealist aesthetics thus seemlessly merge aesthetics [End Page 256] and ethics. Although the earliest versions of idealist aesthetics had been espoused by Romantic radicals such as Friedrich Schiller, Madame de Staël, and - a little later - Shelley, by the time of A Doll's House, the Romantic movement was long dead; yet idealist aesthetics lived on, albeit in increasingly tired and exhausted forms, which often were aligned with conservative and moralistic social forces. Not surprisingly, then, in the wake of the radical Danish intellectual Georg Brandes's fiery call for a modern literature in his 1871-72 lectures on Hovedstrømninger i Europeisk litteratur, idealism was increasingly coming under attack, and - as I show in my book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism - Ibsen's works were the linchpin of the burgeoning modernist opposition to idealism.4 The moment of A Doll's House marks a clear shift in the increasingly intense cultural battle between idealists and emerging modernists in Europe. Idealist responses to A Doll's House were embattled in a way that idealist responses to Love's Comedy and Emperor and Galilean were not.5 In this article, I will show that defenders of Ibsen's realism nevertheless come across as less sophisticated than their idealist opponents. In fact, by propagating the idea that A Doll's House was to be understood as a "slice of life," Ibsen's first admirers entirely missed his pro-theatricalism, his metatheatrical insistence that what we are seeing is theatre. Around 1880, then, neither Ibsen's enemies nor his friends were in a position truly to grasp the scope of his aesthetic achievement. But idealism was not just an important element in the reception of A Doll's House. It is also embedded in the play, most strikingly in the character of Torvald Helmer, a card-carrying idealist aesthete if ever there was one. Moreover, Helmer's idealism and Nora's unthinking echoing of it make them theatricalize both themselves and each other, most strikingly by taking themselves to be starring in various idealist scenarios of female sacrifice and male rescue. Ibsen's critique of idealism is the condition of possibility for his revolutionary analysis of gender in modernity. In this respect, the key line of the play is Nora's claim to be "first and foremost a human being (359)."6 Nora's struggle for recognition as a human being is rightly considered an exemplary case of women's struggle for political and social rights.7 But Nora claims her humanity only after explicitly rejecting two other identities: namely, "doll" and "wife and mother." In order to show what these refusals mean, I first consider the signification of the figure of the doll. "The human body is the best picture of the human soul," Ludwig Wittgenstein writes (152). What...

Ibsen's Unexpected Triumph:Peer Gynt at the Seattle Repertory Playhouse Victor Holtcamp (bio) One woman came a thousand miles from San Francisco just to see it. They came from all classes and walks of life—fishermen from up north, lumberjacks from the Grays Harbor Region. I recall seeing a day laborer, who had been working in the rain all day repairing the cartracks in front of the theatre, go to the box office of The Playhouse at quitting time to buy a pair of seats. The same people came twice, some three, four and more times to see it. Albert Ottenheimer, "Seattle's 'Peer Gynt,'" June 1941 It is commonplace to consider Henrik Ibsen as one of the fathers of modern drama. Realistic pieces like A Doll's House and Ghosts practically defined the plays of the art theatre movement and linked him to box-set realism. Their subsequent widespread inclusion in dramatic literature anthologies further paints Ibsen as the playwright of the middle-class domestic drama. But before Nora and Torvald, Ibsen had written theatre pieces more closely akin to epic poetry. Brand (1866) tells the story—in verse—of a man of God who brooks no compromise from himself or others, and who dies, onstage, being crushed by an avalanche. Theatrically, Peer Gynt is even more challenging. Published in 1867 but not receiving its first production until nine years later, Peer clocks in, uncut, at five acts and thirty-eight scenes. It managed to put even Ibsen himself to sleep during an unedited performance of it in honor of his birthday. "I shall be satisfied," he is reported to have said, "as long as the piece is reduced to a proper length. Not to do this would spoil everything."1 Peer Gynt is enormous, covering the picaresque wanderings of its titular hero as he runs from his village in the Norwegian hills, woos the daughter of the Troll King, sails the world as a slave [End Page 165] trader and merchant, meets madmen and fools, comes face to face with his own mortality, and returns home as an old man to the woman he has always loved and who has always loved him. Like Goethe's Faust (one of Ibsen's inspirations), Peer Gynt focuses on a strong central character, addresses weighty issues of morality and identity, and blends the natural and the supernatural in a theology that is anything but orthodox.2 Both Peer and Faust held (and continue to hold) fascination and dread for theatre producers. As such, despite Ibsen's own significant popularity among the theatre cognoscenti of the early twentieth century, it did not have much of a life outside of Norway, and even there only received a major production once every ten years.3 Vast in scope, difficult in staging, demanding in technical requirements, poetic in timbre, and lengthy in performance, Peer Gynt was enough to daunt even the most enthusiastic of theatre-makers. Infrequent might be too weak a word for the production history of Peer, which had somewhere between four and six U.S. productions prior to 1930, including a production by the Santa Barbara Community Players in the late 1920s and a rumored staging by a "Norwegian Workingman's Society" in Seattle sometime between 1890 and 1893.4 Yet it is Peer Gynt that Albert Ottenheimer describes in the above epigraph as one of the most popular shows he had ever been a part of. Peer Gynt was not only a landmark production for the Seattle Repertory Playhouse in the 1930s but also one of their biggest moneymakers, responsible, according to one account, for saving the fledgling theatre company from bankruptcy and dissolution.5 Originally mounted in 1931, the play would be revived four times over the course of the next decade, earning notices in national publications as it enticed locals and visitors alike. Peer Gynt became one of the longest-running shows in Seattle until after World War II, seen by over twelve thousand people in its initial nearly three-month run; it had a rare combination of theatrical artistry and popular appeal, earning lauds in multiple papers and rave reviews in four languages. How did it happen...

Reviewed by: A Global Doll's House: Ibsen and Distant Visions by Julie Holledge et al Antje Budde A GLOBAL DOLL'S HOUSE: IBSEN AND DISTANT VISIONS. By Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; pp. 234. Reflecting on their project, the authors of A Global Doll's House write that "[t]he study of so many productions of a single play is unprecedented in the historiography of modern drama, and the techniques of data analysis and visualization that we used have far-reaching possibilities for the field" (202). One might assume that there cannot possibly be anything substantial or even minor left to be said about the globally performed production of Henrik Ibsen's well-known Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House). This book will convince the reader otherwise. A Global Doll's House sets out to map the contradictory forces of the global production history of this canonical play in order to meticulously identify factors for its global success on five continents and across many cultures. There have been other valuable publications discussing Ibsen's work within the context of globalization and cross-cultural exchange. However, this book, using digital data analytics as a major methodological tool, opens an entirely new door to the Ibsen research of the future. The writing style is very concise and scientific, yet leaves space for playfulness and surprise. This stylistic dynamic mirrors—and quite joyfully so—the research methodology that is based on a very effective dialectical integration of close readings and distant visions, an interesting switching between tree and forest vision. The authors state that the "underlying premise of the book is that new ways of looking produce new ways of thinking" (6; emphasis in original). In this particular case I am very much in agreement, as this is precisely what this book does. While close readings are an established method of critical analysis in literature and theatre studies, exercising a distant view enabled by digital data visualization offers immense potential for research. The book is divided into two parts, "Cultural Transmission" and "Adaptation," which are the two chosen angles through which it explores the mechanics, dynamics, and historical stages of the play's growing global significance over the last 135 years. The organizing pattern of each of its parts introduces its use of terminology and methodology, before it launches into the analysis of two very specific aspects or case studies, and then concludes with a summary of its major findings. Part 1 includes "Mapping the Early Noras," in which we learn about the early commercial history of this play and patterns of transmission that challenge conventional narratives of Ibsen's success as a playwright. This is juxtaposed with brief vignettes about the lives of performers who played Nora—each vignette a breathtaking miniature provocation, ready to set off a cascade of new research in the future. This is followed by "'Peddling' Et dukkehjem: The Role of the State," which reveals "the intertwined forces of major theatre companies, theatrical families, state departments, and state policy initiatives in producing Et dukkehjem" (103). It also addresses a set of motivations for these transmissions on the Norwegian side that are not at all necessarily grounded in artistic appreciation of Ibsen's work or the desire for social/feminist change and/or individual liberation. Part 2, "Adaptation," is broken down into "Adaptation at a Distance" and "Ibsen's Challenge: The Tarantella Rehearsal." These two chapters provide exciting new insights into the patterns and structures of dramaturgical and performative engagement with Ibsen's dramatic text, exemplified through visualizations and critical discussions of artistic, cultural, and political interventions that speak to the enormous flexibility that Ibsen's play offers to theatre artists across time and space. My personally favorite section, which will inform my teaching, research, and [End Page 261] creative praxis, is the discussion of physical scores embedded in dramatic writing, of which Ibsen was a highly sophisticated maker. The book includes not only rigorous scholarly narratives, but also visualized graphs, maps, and networks that allow us to understand patterns, structures, and models of Ibsen's global success from a metaphorical bird...

Ibsen in Translation is an ongoing project, sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its aim is to produce direct translations from Norwegian of twelve of Ibsen’s contemporary plays. The project started in 2009, and the following nine plays have been translated so far: The Master Builder (2010), A Doll’s House (2011), An Enemy of the People (2012), Pillars of Society (2012/2013), Ghosts (2013), Rosmersholm (2014) The Wild Duck (2014), The Lady from the Sea (2015) and Hedda Gabl...

Henrik Ibsen's poetic drama Peer Gynt (1867) stands at a crossroads in Ibsen's dramatic career. It marks both the end and the apex of his great achievements as a poetic dramatist. At the same time, Peer Gynt signifies a new direction in Ibsen's work toward psychological and philosophical stories about individuals confronting life in the modern world. Ibsen's first break into philosophical drama came with his earlier poetic comedy Love's Comedy. Ibsenborrowed the theme of this play from the great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Unfortunately, Love's Comedy was not a commercial success. It was 8rand, the story of a priest whose motto ”al1 or nothing” leads to his own destruction, that marked Ibsen's first great success, and many of Ibsen's contemporaries saw in this play an obvious Kierkegaardian influence. Ibsenfollowed Brand with his monumental companion piece, Peer Gynt, a play that now ranks with Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare's Hamlet as one of the great philosophical dramas of al1 time. More than any of Ibsen's other plays Peer Gynt is an expression of Kierkegaard. The great theme of Ibsen's play is its depiction of a common man who desires nothing more than to achieve his true self and live his life freely and fully. Mirroring Kierkegaard's remarkably modern psychological insights, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is also a universal story of tragic doubt or despair over choice, which Kierkegaard labels 'the sickness unto death', and which determines the whole course of Peer's life, casting him into the darkness of anti-heroism. The crux of what makes Ibsenand his plays-most notably Peer Gynt-relevant to the 21st century derives from the mid 19th century Kierkegaadian notion of modern freedom, the freedom to choose oneself. Religious fundamentalism is the contemporary antagonist of Ibsen. Fundamentalism traps existence in an endless mindless tunnel. It is not concerned with the individual or the Gyntian attainment of one's self. Fundamentalism and the religions that have spawned it are responsible for disemboweling choice; they are the single dead-end out of the modern world. Thus, now more than ever we need the plays of Ibsenin order to speak out against the global catastrophe of fundamentalism.

Although Henrik Ibsen is secure in his reputation as a major dramatist and intellectual figure, little attention has been given to the connections between his dramatic practice and his plays' powerful impact on audience and culture. Michael Goldman examines the play attacks us in the theater and the means by which Ibsen assaults the audience's expectations and opinions. Focusing on specific features of Ibsen's dramaturgy that have been overlooked or underappreciated, Goldman looks at the plays' unsettling dialogue and driving plots, then explores the impacts on both character and audience when Ibsen's powerful vision takes effect. How does Ibsen illustrate a character's inner turmoil, and how is this quality realized by the actor on stage? What is the spine--the single, definitive phrase used by actors to pinpoint the dominant motivation-in A Doll's House? How does the stage design in The Wild Duck arouse the audience's curiosity? With considerable attention to these plays as well as The Master Builder and Peer Gynt, Goldman examines the characteristic moments of crisis and the striking similarities of gesture and language from play to play. Goldman discusses every aspect of Ibsen's art, from language, psychological motive, and narrative construct, to approaches used by actors and directors in play productions.

PEER GYNT AND THE IDEA OF SELF Peer Gynt very probably will always be thought of as Ibsen's greatest work. Certainly, it is his most national and also his most universal drama. A great deal has been written about this poetic drama, and with so complex a work there are of necessity differences of view and differences of emphasis among the critics. I believe, however, that some of the differences of interpretation might well be reconciled if Peer Gynt were studied in relation to Ibsen's other "will" plays, if attention were given to the play's structure, and, above all, if its rich symbolism were considered as an integral part of the play's composition and not just as extraneous decoration or embellishment. The distinction that Ibsen makes between the Gyntish Self and the true Self attains clarity only when the symbolism has been elucidated. It is the true Self, not the Gyntish Self, that carries the principal theme of the play. I believe there will proceed from this approach to Peer Gynt an unequivocal statement of what Ibsen intended to convey in it. I The years from 1863 to 1873 might well be termed Ibsen's period of greatest achievement. This is the decade of the great "will" plays, Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), and Emperor and Galilean (1873), which are introduced by Ibsen's only successful historical tragedy, The Pretenders (1863). The broad subject that gives cohesive unity to these four plays is that of an uncompromising personal idealism, which is explored with infinite variation through the theme on the nature of the will. Ideologically, these dramas have their roots in the early works of Ibsen, but, being products of a mature art, the four later dramas convey more authoritatively and convincingly than the preceding ones Ibsen's view of man's freedom of choice and freedom of action. Brand marks the height of Ibsen's accomplishment in tragedy within the early nineteenth century tradition, while the four plays as a whole reveal Ibsen's use of irony, ironic humor and the paradox at their best. I shall consider briefly the relationship of these four plays with the last of the early works (Love's Comedy), their own particular unity, and the special affinity between Brand and Peer Gynt. At the end of Love's Comedy (1862) the poet Falk assumes a position which can loosely be called idealistic. He has freed himself from the last "manacle of slavery" (tradition), and he can now carry on the war against the lie: social hypocrisy. But there is no assurance that he will succeed, for the point of view he adopts is not his own but that of Svanhild. Falk therefore sets out into the world with a breach in his armor, namely, that he has 103 104 MODERN DRAMA September relied on another's faith in his belief rather than on his own. The idealist Falk, who lived on borrowed goods, becomes the doubter and the procrastinator Skule of The Pretenders. Skule demonstrates that one could not live for or by another person's view; the best he could do was to die for it. The unity between Love's Comedy and The Pretenders is thus t...lrrough the Falk-Skule relationship, and this is extended into Brand. It is self-evident that Brand is an individual who not only has evolved his own view but who also has unshakable faith in it. The further unity between The Pretenders and Brand is achieved through the passive Hakon and Brand. Hakon, who had a complete but rather naive faith in himself because he was so certain of God's support in his endeavors, as he interpreted it, discovered eventually that some punishment was meted out from above even to him, and it was incomprehensible to him why he who had not sinned should be punished at all. There was confusion rather than doubt in Hakon's mind when he, answering Margrete's question of whether he realized he had condemned her father to death, said: "God, God,-why hast thou stricken me so sorely, when I have in nowise sinned!" (III, 241) But his great sin was his...

In Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s adaptation of Ibsen’s En folkefiende ( An enemy of the people) , another Ibsen play serves as a crucial intertext: In the film, the protagonist and his family watch a Chinese production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the National Theatre in Oslo. This article examines Skjoldbjaerg’s film as an Ibsen adaptation in which a second Ibsen play serves as a significant intertext, or play-within-the-film, by examining the status and the function of the play-within-the-film. The conclusion is twofold: (1) The theatre sequence in the film indicates that protagonist Tomas Stockmann, by identifying with the Peer Gynt of the Chinese play, is given a motto – ”Straight through!” – that, however, is not really Peer Gynt’s motto in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt , but very similar to that of his counterpart in Ibsen’s oeuvre, namely Brand, and Brand’s “ Intet eller alt ”, “ All or Nothing ”. In the film Stockmann is made to share Brand’s idealism and heroism via a Peer Gynt that resembles Brand more than Peer Gynt, insisting as he does on fighting his way through. The complexity of the protagonist of the film is thus reflected in two opposed Ibsen characters, two opposites in Ibsen’s oeuvre, Brand and Peer Gynt. (2) This does not unambiguously support the adapter intention, that according to the director is to present a new, critical interpretation of the protagonist, but also challenges, or even undermines it: The critique of Tomas Stockmann as an extreme idealist, a destructive radical and an impossible hero, is confronted by the likewise obvious necessity of his kind.

In the course of his long career, Ronconi has often staged Ibsen (The Wild Duck, John Gabriel Borkman, Ghosts, Peer Gynt, A Doll House). The interview of Olimpia Sales precisely retraces the steps of Ronconi’s interest for Ibsen. Ronconi loves Ibsen in the size of ambiguity. One feature that concerns also the director. As it says in the interview, ironically, perhaps because both Ibsen and Ronconi are born under the sign of Pisces.