I pulled this essay off of the indispensable Arts & Letters website, one of my daily pitstops. Michael Billington discusses the importance of Ibsen and Strindberg, breaking down how revolutionary these two playwrights actually were and how relevant they continue to be. I love what he has to say, and how he says it:
Although by taste and temperament I prefer Ibsen, he seems the harder figure to grasp. That may be partly because of a fatal 1891 photograph that shows a quasi-biblical patriarch glaring out at us from behind mutton-chop whiskers. But it is also partly because of a caricature idea of the plays all too accurately summed up by Tyrone Guthrie in A Life in the Theatre: “High thinking takes place in a world of dark-crimson serge tablecloths with chenille hobbles, black horsehair sofas, wall brackets and huge intellectual women in raincoats and rubbers.”
But that image reflects bad, old Ibsen stagings; today a whole host of directors have freed us from the tyranny of furniture and shown us that Ibsen can be spare, ironic, witty and sexy. What also perennially strikes me about Ibsen is his raging modernity. As long as human beings – and not just women – are trapped by an imprisoning domesticity, A Doll’s House will arouse shivers of recognition. His rarely seen play Pillars of Society demonstrates the dangers of sacrificing public safety to private profit. And watching Tony Blair dismissing his critics on Newsnight recently, I was reminded of Dr Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, and his unshakable belief that “the minority is always right”.
Ibsen is still our contemporary.
Oh yes. I completely agree.
My parents took us to see Doll’s House at The Abbey Theater in Dublin when we were kids. I was 14 years old at the time, and it made such an impression on me that I still remember elements of the staging, I remember Nora’s desperate tarantella (oh, what a scene!), and where everybody was standing as she danced about like a mad woman. It was phenomenal.
Unfortunately, my father (or was it my mother?) mixed up Doll’s House with Hedda Gabler, and had warned us before going into the play that the heroine shoots herself at the end … just to prepare us for the shock. We were, after all, just kids. But of course, Nora does NOT shoot herself at the end of Doll’s House. She says goodbye to her husband and walks out the door, leaving her life and her children behind.
But until the damn curtain fell, we all sat there, terrified, wincing, waiting for the sound of shots. A rather baffling experience.
As we applauded their curtain calls, we all murmured to one another:
“So … did she kill herself?”
“Where were the shots?”
“Wait a minute … she lived?”
