Ibsen’s Relevance and Influence Endure
By JULIA M. KLEIN
Theater critics aren’t always the savviest harbingers of revolution nor, for that matter, its most ardent advocates. Even so, it is startling to note the contumely that greeted the premieres of many of Henrik Ibsen’s most enduring works. As recounted in Michael Meyer’s 1967 biography, Ibsen, the German critics were cool to A Doll’s House, the British press denounced Ghosts as a “mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity,” and nearly everyone regarded Hedda Gabler as a failure, largely because of the very moral complexity that now intrigues us.
Today Ibsen’s wedding of tragedy to the ethical dilemmas and unadorned rhetoric of middle-class characters seems like the necessary prelude to modern drama, from George Bernard Shaw to Arthur Miller. Within his stuffed Victorian living rooms, the Norwegian playwright championed free-thinking, if flawed, heroes over both the conformist masses and self-aggrandizing authorities. His signature metaphors of corruption and contagion along with the violent undertow in his works, informed by the upheavals of 19th-century Europe retain their relevance. The fateful door-slamming in A Doll’s House, the shattered glass in An Enemy of the People, and the climactic gunshots in Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck are staples of our theatrical vocabulary. Ibsen has become, as W.H. Auden might say, a whole climate of opinion about the possibilities and the limits of realistic prose drama though the dramatist himself, more protean than his legacy, was also a poet and a symbolist.
According to Meyer, Ibsen (1828-1906) was a prickly, obsessive character, estranged from most of his family, his small hometown of Skien, and, for many years, Norway itself. He remained haunted by his father’s financial failure a theme that turns up frequently in his plays and later fathered an illegitimate child, an event that also provided dramatic fodder. (Meyer claims that Ibsen had doubts about his own paternity as well.) After the embittering experience of directing financially struggling theaters in Bergen and Christiania (now Oslo) and the poor reception afforded his early works, he lived for 27 years in Germany and Italy. His first real success was Brand, an 1866 poetic drama that the translator Geoffrey Hill calls “a tragic farce.”
Ibsen returned to Norway to live in 1891, when his reputation was secure. In his final years, though still married to his longtime wife, Suzannah Thoresen (with whom he had a son, Sigurd), he indulged in a series of flirtations with considerably younger women, bartering his fame for romance, or the illusion of it. By the time he died, he was a world-historical figure and an icon in his native Scandinavia. It was not uncommon for other European writers an admiring young James Joyce among them to learn Norwegian so they could read Ibsen in the original.
In this centenary year of his death, Ibsen continues to spark fresh appraisal and controversy. In recent months, he has been the subject of critical re-evaluation (Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy, from Oxford University Press), historical conjecture (Steven F. Sage’s provocative Ibsen and Hitler: The Playwright, the Plagiarist, and the Plot for the Third Reich, from Carroll & Graf), and a translated Norwegian novel (Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity, from Graywolf Press). In addition, as one might expect, Ibsen’s plays are being adapted and produced in festivals around the world.
In New York, for example, Oslo Elsewhere recently presented “Henrik Ibsen + Jon Fosse: Norway Meets New York” at 59E59 Theaters, juxtaosing the American premiere of the contemporary Norwegian playwright’s deathvariations with a new translation of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886). At Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company through October 22 is the acclaimed Norwegian director Kjetil Bang-Hansen’s brisk, engaging version of An Enemy of the People (1882), which emphasizes the play’s comedy and humanity.
As Meyer notes, many English-language productions, using stilted translations, have leached the humor and sexiness from Ibsen’s work. In recent years, however, that trend seems to have reversed. A West End production of A Doll’s House (1879), which won four Tony Awards after its 1997 transfer to Broadway, presented a Nora (Janet McTeer) bursting with neurotic tics and sharing a genuine sexual bond with Torvald (Owen Teale). Her exit became as a result more emotionally complex, marking not just a feminist triumph but a moment of sadness and loss. A 2001 Broadway production of Hedda Gabler (1890), starring Kate Burton, was alternately praised and chided for delivering a sympathetically frustrated Hedda who might have stepped out of Diary of a Mad Housewife.
The Oslo Elsewhere double bill, which closed September 9, was a far chillier affair. In Fosse’s riveting deathvariations, Keatsian romantic longing is laced with Scandinavian melancholy, and the play’s spare, incantatory dialogue recalls Beckett and Pinter. The Norwegian-American Sarah Cameron Sunde both translated and directed the play, complementing its austere symbolism with an exquisitely stylized staging that used light to suggest both mood swings and the passage of time.
Deathvariations begins quietly with an estranged couple, grief-stricken but still at odds, trying to absorb the news of their daughter’s death. It then flashes back to the early days of their marriage, as the optimistic young man and his anxious pregnant wife discuss how to make ends meet in their basement apartment. The realism of the setup contrasts with the later metaphysical preoccupations of their daughter, who flirts with a mysterious handsome stranger called “the Friend.” In an image torn from an Edvard Munch canvas, the doomed woman and her prospective mate (or fate) extend their arms and take each other’s hands in a slow, seductive dance of death. She leaps finally into the sea, an act that left my theater companion (not unlike the girl’s bereaved parents) complaining about insufficient motivation. Still, deathvariations, only the second of Fosse’s works to be presented in this country, is a fine introduction to a playwright who has already won considerable European acclaim.
In Rosmersholm, too, a man and a woman in love are able to find passionate unity only in a watery grave. But this production, directed by Timothy Douglas from an adaptation by Anna Guttormsgaard and Bridgette Wimberly (with Oda Radoor), never managed to find a coherent style, nor to endow its final tragedy with a convincing rationale. Admittedly, this latter failing is largely Ibsen’s and more bothersome in a work filled with talky attitudinizing than in the poetic Fosse.
This adaptation pares down the original considerably and transposes the setting from Norway to America a move indicated mainly by colloquialisms, name alterations, and nontraditional casting (John Rosmer is played by the soap-opera star Charles Parnell, one of three African-Americans in the cast). Rosmersholm contains much vague talk about conservatism, radicalism, and spiritual transformation, but, politically speaking, it’s hard to grasp precisely what’s at stake or even what era we’re in.
In any case, the core drama is a psychological one, played out primarily in the shifting relationships among the minister Rosmer, his live-in friend Rebecca West (an excellent Guttormsgaard), nd Rosmer’s dead wife, Beth (Beata in the Norwegian), a suicide. Like the daughter in deathvariations, the absent woman remains a persistent presence among the living. “It’s the dead that cling to Rosmersholm,” the housekeeper, Mrs. Helseth, says portentously.
West, in this version a photographer, is haunted by her past, driven by her desires but also willing to abjure them. As for Beth, she is at once deranged and prescient, a crazy Cassandra whose prophecies are inevitably fulfilled. Neither the play nor the production makes an adequate case for Rebecca’s decision to sacrifice herself for Rosmer, and still less for his following suit. We’re left only with the housekeeper’s anguished scream another evocation of Munch to underline the horror and the pity of their choice.
Toril Moi, in her study of Ibsen and modernism, makes the play more intelligible by situating it in its aesthetic context. To Moi, a professor of literature and Romance studies at Duke University, Rosmersholm is an investigation of romantic delusions, linguistic skepticism, and the increasingly sterile idealist tradition. She sees Rebecca and Rosmer as both grand and mad, “heartbroken romantics … who cannot bear the world that bourgeois democracy has produced.” Moi doesn’t deny that Rosmersholm has its Gothic and melodramatic elements from the “white horses” that foreshadow death to the ancient curse of Rosmersholm. But Ibsen’s intentions, she says, are to mock and appropriate those genres, not to ape them.
While Moi interprets Ibsen through the lens of modernism, Sage peruses the playwright’s work for the keys to Hitler’s murderous ascent. Ibsen and Hitler is an odd but fascinating book, cultural history written with a veneer of scientific rigor. Sage maintains that three Ibsen dramas An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean (1873), and The Master Builder (1892) were key influences on Hitler. He demonstrates that rhetoric from Enemy found its way into Mein Kampf, and that Hitler was in contact with German intellectuals who regarded the playwright as a prophet.
Far more audaciously, Sage suggests that Hitler used Ibsen’s monumental Roman historical drama, Emperor and Galilean, about Julian the Apostate (331-63), as a virtual blueprint for everything from Kristallnacht to Hitler’s nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. Sage argues, for example, that Hitler arranged the murder of his niece and rumored lover, Geli Raubal, in 1931 as part of a ritualistic prelude to seizing power a parallel, however inexact, to the death of Julian’s wife, Helena, after eating a poisoned peach (itself a dramatic invention). Historians won’t buy all of Sage’s contentions, but his work is likely to spur further investigation.
Another Ibsen drama, The Wild Duck, serves as the springboard for Shyness and Dignity, a slim but impressive 1996 novel about a schoolteacher whose life reaches both its climax and its nadir in a single day. (It has been admirably translated by Sverre Lyngstad for the Ibsen centenary.) The narrative starts with teacher Elias Rukla’s attempt to offer a new interpretation of a minor character in The Wild Duck to his uncomprehending class. After indulging in a fit of rage that may end his career, he ruminates on his student days, his onetime best friend, and the origins of his now-deteriorating marriage. The novel ends, like many Ibsen plays, on a note of pessimism and irresolution.
So, too, does An Enemy of the People. The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s staging nevertheless reminds us how engrossing Ibsen can be. This is a beautiful production, set in the 1930s, elegantly lit, and designed by Timian Alsaker in grays and browns reminiscent of a sepia-toned photograph. Yet there is nothing languid or still about Bang-Hansen’s directionof this new translation by Rick Davis and Brian Johnston. The show breezes along, in concert with Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s headlong rush toward both triumph and disaster, before climaxing in a stunning tableau of isolation.
Acting in an official capacity, Stockmann has discovered the bacterial pollution of the town’s water supply, which is poisoning the baths that are the town’s economic underpinning. No problem fixing the mess, he naïvely figures until he encounters the corruption of the politicians, press, and townspeople who would prefer to see the costly problem hushed up. Joseph Urla’s Stockmann, moving from convivial warmth to almost unintelligible rage, is a man whose intransigence is not so much innate as the product of desperate necessity.
Both set and sound design amplify Ibsen’s symbolism. Pipes arrayed in a deco pattern frame the stage, while others are visible through the large arched windows. At key moments, we hear the drip of water, as though forecasting a deluge or the wearing down of Stockmann’s resistance.
Stockmann’s chief adversary is his brother, Peter, the mayor, as stiff and pompous in Philip Goodwin’s reading as Thomas is loose-limbed and sincere. Caught in between are the “moderate” Aslaksen (Rick Foucheux) and the backpedaling liberal newspaper editor, Hovstad (Derek Lucci), another in Ibsen’s gallery of contemptible press barons.
In some productions, the crusading doctor’s hyperbolic attacks on the stupidity of the majority can seem almost maniacal or, at the least, embarrassingly elitist and antidemocratic. This translation wisely emphasizes the notion of intellectual distinction and eliminates Stockmann’s eugenic rants. But the tension at the heart of the play remains: Stockmann’s passion for the truth (or is it simply for being right?) is arrayed against every interest in the town, and finally even the welfare of his own family. The stakes rise, and so do the temptations to acquiesce. One thinks of the tempting of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) written just three years after Miller himself adapted An Enemy of the People.
Enemy was Ibsen’s angry response to the critical vituperation directed at Ghosts, but it has transcended its historical context in a way that Rosmersholm cannot. In this sleek production, the play still cracks like a whip against the dangers of groupthink, callow politicians, double-dealing newspaper editors, and a menagerie of other discreditable 19th- and 21st-century types.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia who writes for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and other publications.