Table Of ContentIBSEN AND THE THEATRE
IBSEN AND THE
THEATRE
Essays in Celebration of the soth
I
Anniversary of Henrik Ibsen's Birth
edited by
Errol Durbach
© Errol Durbach 1 g8o
Softc over reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1980
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1fj8o by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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ISBN 978-1-349-05299-8 ISBN 978-1-349-05297-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-05297-4
Reproduced from copy supplied
Contents
Acknowledgements
Vl
Notes on the Contributors
Vll
Introduction Errol Durbach 1
2 Ibsen: a Biographical Approach Michael Meyer 14
3 Ibsen on the English Stage: 'The Proof of the Pudding is in
the Eating' lnga-Stina Ewbank 27
4 Ibsen and the Scandinavian Theatre Lise-Lone Marker
and Frederick J. Marker 49
5 Ibsen and Modern Drama Martin Esslin 7 I
6 Hedda Gabler: the Play in Performance Janet Suzman 83
7 Ibsen's use of Language in When We Dead Awaken
John Northam
I05
8 Ibsen and the Actors Evert Sprinchorn I I 8
9 The Structured World of Ibsen's Late Dramas
James McFarlane 131
Index 141
v
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the Canada Council for conferring upon Ibsen
the honorary status of Canadian citizenship for the purposes of
funding the 'Ibsen and the Theatre' conference-and Ronald
Bryden for corroborating this view of Ibsen in his witty banquet
address; the Consul General ofNorway in Vancouver, Mr Nils Axel
Nissen, and Mrs Liv Nissen, for their interest and support; Mr Peter
Haworth for his participation in the evening of dramatic readings
from Ibsen; Michael Meyer, as consulting member in London for
the conference committee; and those committee members on the
faculty of the University of British Columbia-Andrew Parkin,
Donald Soule, Marke ta Goetz Stankiewicz-and especially Philip
Moir, who administered the financial and other arrangements, and
Jonathan Wisenthal who first conceived of the idea of the
conference and who braved the various crises that attended its
realisation.
E.D.
VI
Notes on the Contributors
Errol Durbach (editor) is Associate Professor of English at the
University of British Columbia, where he teaches Modern and
Comparative Drama. He has published many articles on Ibsen, and
is currently writing a book on Ibsen and Romanticism.
Martin Esslin was head of the Drama Department of the BBC,
where he produced nearly all oflbsen's major plays for radio. He is
an influential drama critic whose Theatre of the Absurd is a seminal
study of modern avant-garde drama, and his books on Brecht and
Pinter are also very highly regarded. Recently appointed as a
Professor of Drama at Stanford University, Martin Esslin now
divides his time between London and California.
Inga-Stina Ewbank is the Hildred Carlile Professor of English at
Bedford College, London, and is a well-known scholar of
Renaissance drama, author of a book on the Brontes, and a
distinguished Ibsenite. She has written several papers on Ibsen's
language, translated John Gabriel Borkman for the National Theatre,
Pillars of the Community for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and
last year provided a literal translation of Brand on which the
National Theatre's poetic version was based.
jaDles McFarlane is Professor of European Literature at the
University of East Anglia, Norwich, and is general editor of the
Oxford Ibsen (London, g6o-77), published in eight volumes. He has
1
published many books and articles on European and Scandinavian
literature in general, and on Ibsen in particular. He is also editor of
Scandinavica: An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies. He was
elected Fellow of the Norwegian Academy in 1977.
Lise-Lone Marker, Professor of Theatrical History at the
Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University ofToronto, is the
author of David Belasco, Naturalism in the American Theatre and other
studies.
VII
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
FrederickJ. Marker is a Professor ofEnglish and Drama at the
University ofToronto. His books include Hans Christian Andersen and
Jhe Romantic Theatre, Kjeld Abell, and several editions and trans
lations. Together, the Markers have published a number of joint
studies, including The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History, and a
portion of The Revels History of Drama in English, 175o-I88o.
Michael Meyer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a
Knight Commander of the Polar Star (Swedish), is the author of
Ibsen: A Biography which is widely acclaimed as the definitive life of
Ibsen, and winner of the Whit bread Biography Prize in I 971. He
has translated all of Ibsen's major plays, and sixteen plays by
Strindberg for which he received the Gold Medal of the Swedish
Academy in I 964. He is also the author of a novel, and of several
plays for radio, television and stage-his most recent, Lunatic and
Lover, about Strindberg and his three wives, winning the Best New
Play of the Fringe award at the I978 Edinburgh Festival. At
present, he is writing a biography of Strindberg.
John Northam, after thirty years at Clare College, Cambridge,
moved to a Chair in the Department ofDrama at Bristol in I 972. He
is the author of Ibsen's Dramatic Method, a landmark in modern Ibsen
studies, and he has recently published Ibsen: A Critical Study. As well
as his many articles on Ibsen, Professor Northam's translations of
some of Ibsen's poems have appeared in the Ibsenarbok.
Evert Sprinchorn is Professor of Drama at Vassar College, New
York, and a well-known and influential critic of Scandinavian
drama. He has published many articles on Ibsen and Strindberg;
translated Strindberg, and is also the editor and translator of Ibsen's
Letters and Speeches.
Janet Suzman's repertoire of dramatic roles extends from
Shakespeare to Brecht and Athol Fugard, and she has appeared in
many television and screen productions. As Masha in The Three
Sisters she won the Plays and Players award for best performance by
an actress, and her Hedda Gabler, both on television and at the
Duke of York's, has been greatly admired.
VIJI
Introduction
1
ERROL DURBACH
I
The papers in this collection were delivered (in varying degrees of
formality and informality) at the 'Ibsen and the Theatre' con
ference, sponsored by the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver in May 1978 to celebrate the 15oth anniversary of
Henrik Ibsen's birth. They are not, of course, the sum total of
the conference proceedings, which included question-periods,
seminars, a plenary session, and an evening of dramatic readings
but they represent the basic material for discussion and debate.
As the title of the collection suggests, the contributors have at
least this in common: that they are all concerned with Ibsen as a
writer for the theatre, approaching him in their individual capacities
as scholars and critics of drama and performance-Michael Meyer
as biographer, linking the intensely private concerns of the life to the
objective presentation of dramatic theme; Inga-Stina Ewbank as
cultural amphibian, inhabiting the divided and distinguished
worlds of Scandinavia and England, literary criticism and practical
collaboration with leading theatre companies on texts for perform
ance; the Markers as theatre historians, with a clear sense oflbsen's
plays as specific productions within a 'chronicle' of Scandinavian
tradition; Martin Esslin as director oflbsen as radio-drama, and as
comparatist, tracing lines of influence and genealogy from Ibsen to
Brecht, Beckett and Pinter; Janet Suzman as actress, recreating
Hedda's metamorphosis from text to stage from within the skin of
the protagonist-the most detailed record of an Ibsen performance
since Elizabeth Robins', fifty years ago; john Northam as linguistic
1
2 IBSEN AND THE THEATRE
analyst, concerned with the theatrical problem of modulating
Ibsen's language from the prosaic chit-chat of the opening scene to
the final poetic revelation of the protagonists' spiritual experience;
Evert Sprinchorn as Professor ofDrama and textual critic, compar
ing the complexity of Ibsen's plays to their treatment on the
contemporary stage; and James McFarlane as translator, editor,
anthologist, and critic-a veritable Lord High Everything Else of
Ibsen scholarship-who sees the formal structure ofa n Ibsen play as
a dynamic 'lattice-work' of constantly shifting relationships. A fear,
voiced by Inga-Stina Ewbank, was that a group oflbsen celebrants
might all be inclined to give the same paper-a fear obviated by the
variety of approaches that are evident in the essays.
It was not the intention oft he conference committee to assemble a
fully representative slate of contemporary approaches to Ibsen, or to
evaluate the present state of Ibsen scholarship. There have been
many uniquely valuable essays and books on Ibsen over the past five
or six years dealing with his mythic patterns, his affinity with
Hegelian ideas, his place in a modern existential and psychological
tradition, and his treatment of the alienated hero; and in limiting
our scope to text, performance and theatre we intend no exclusive
assertion of method or approach. It remains remarkable that a
dramatist writing in an archaic nineteenth century language
neither wholly Norwegian nor wholly Danish-and in a dramatic
form that would seem to have fallen out of favour in the modern
theatre, should continue to fascinate scholars from Canada to japan
and to hold his own on the stages of the world. It is this phenomenon
that we wished to investigate, moved partly by the spirit of Ibsen's
own address delivered in Christiania on the occasion of his
seventieth birthday: his amazement at having won international
recognition as a dramatist, and his delight at the friendship and
understanding of foreign admirers; the rather melancholy aware
ness of the exile, who has won a home in strange lands, of his own
essential homelessness, his 'alienness' (to borrow Inga-Stina
Ewbank's term); and, especially, his sense of what is appropriate to
an anniversary celebration-a gathering of divergent opinions and
views around a single purpose. All I can hope to do, by way of
introduction, is to provide a brief sampling of some such divergent
opinions and then to suggest the singleness of purpose and
the common concerns that underlie the eclecticism of this collec
tion.
