“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.” — Henrik Ibsen

It’s his birthday today.

Some posts from my archive:

This is a doozy, an excerpt from an amazing book made up of transcribed lectures on Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, by legendary actress and acting teacher Stella Adler. It’s a great acting book (and an insightful portrait of who she was as a teacher: she was the one who taught Brando (although she said that Brando in an acting class was like “a tiger in a jungle school”. She taught everyone. She turned out different types of actors than her rival and former colleague Lee Strasberg. Robert De Niro said one of the best acting classes he ever took – and the most useful – was her script analysis classes. These lectures are from those script analysis classes, and even just an excerpt shows why De Niro felt the way he did. Stella Adler on playing Ibsen: “You have to learn the size of Ibsen. The size of the conflict. The size of the land and how it stuck out into the sea. The size of the darkness.”

Henrik Ibsen was crucial in James Joyce’s development. Ibsen’s plays went off like a BOMB in the culture. They changed everything. They were controversial. They were hot topics. They were social critiques. They “went after” long-held status quo assumptions (like the position of women in society, as just one example.) James Joyce was awe-struck at what Ibsen had wrought – Joyce would cause an even bigger revolution than Ibsen caused – although the young college student had no way of knowing it at the time. Joyce became so obsessed he learned Norwegian so he could read the plays in the original. He wrote a letter to Ibsen, in halting Norwegian. Ibsen wrote back. Here’s a post about it: James Joyce’s correspondence with Ibsen: “I am a young Irishman, eighteen years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life.”

More on James Joyce and Ibsen: Joyce write to Ibsen: “I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead — how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now.”

When someone changes the world as much as Joyce did, it is essential to understand what changed HIS world. In many ways, Joyce did two things: he shattered the cultural connection with the past – it was destructive, his gift – while also incorporating the entirety of the past in his own writing. It was both and all. Ibsen was the spark that lit Joyce’s flame.

This is critical of Ibsen, but I still think there’s much insight to be taken from it, and you can’t say that the comment is inaccurate. In Clifford Odets’ 1940 journal The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, he relates a comment from Lee Strasberg on “the blight of Ibsen”.

I think about Strasberg’s comment all the time.

And finally: The greatest performance I have ever seen was an Irish actress playing Nora in A Doll’s House at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, when I was a kid. That performance LOOMS in my memory. It wasn’t until the Internet was invented that I could track down her name. I was 12 years old. I will never forget that performance. I wrote about it, and her.

 
 
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