Six Plays Read online

  Ibsen’s return to the stage connected him to another aspect of modernism: a set of new and innovative techniques of staging, a veritable revolution in theater practice. If Ibsen’s fame is unthinkable without the scandals surrounding the publication and performance of his plays, it is equally unthinkable without the help of directors throughout Europe. While some famous actors, such as Sir Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt, refused to play Ibsen, some of the most remarkable directors took to his plays and turned them into entirely novel theater experiences. The first path-breaking director to perform Ibsen was Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, who performed Ibsen’s historical drama The Pretenders as early as 1875. The influence of the Meiningen players on a whole generation of modernist directors cannot be underestimated. Everyone from Antoine and Granville-Barker to Stanislavsky and Rein hardt regarded the Duke as the first real director, the originator of the modern director’s theater.

  Most of the Duke’s innovations are common practice now, and so it is difficult to appreciate their impact on contemporaries. One innovation was the Meiningen players’ use of crowd scenes, of which there were several in The Pretenders. Action was no longer organized around the speeches of the lead actors but occurred simultaneously on several levels. One practice that helped achieve these famous crowd scenes was a singular devotion to ensemble acting. The players formed a cohesive group, and even the most talented actors would sometimes play small supporting roles. Other now-familiar elements employed by the players include historically accurate scenery and costumes, and a critique of the painted, two-dimensional scenery and use instead of a three-dimensional set. The Meiningen players’ 1875 production of The Pretenders in Berlin was one of their first productions outside their provincial hometown and can therefore be seen as an important step in their career. Soon more tours followed, taking them to London in 1881, to Moscow in 1890, where a young Stanislavsky was awed by them, and finally to a tour of no less than thirty-eight European cities. After The Pretenders, the players presented other plays by Ibsen, most notably Ghosts in a landmark performance in 1886.

  Many later directors, among them Antoine and Stanislavsky, were in one way or another influenced by the Meiningen players. In 1887 Antoine founded the Théâtre Libre, which became the first naturalist theater, and produced Ibsen’s most notorious play, Ghosts, playing Oswald himself. Once more, a central innovator of the stage had decided to turn to an Ibsen play, and one of the notorious ones at that, to stage a revolution in the theater. The most influential director to champion Ibsen, however, was Stanislavsky, whose method of acting has set the standard for psychological realism and detail until today (Stanislavsky’s method became particularly influential in the United States, shaping such actors as Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro). What the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen had done for crowd and costume, Stanislavsky did for the creation, or building, of individual characters, demanding a whole new approach to rehearsal through the study of minutia of gestures and movement, involving the body and memory of the actor. Antoine had starred as Oswald in his production of Ghosts, and Stanislavksy played Doctor Stockmann in his production of Enemy of the People, a role that made him famous and that he would refer to many times in his treatises on acting. During his work in the theater in Bergen and Christiania, Ibsen had often complained about the constraints imposed by actors trained exclusively to perform in well-made plays. Finally, his desire to turn away from the simplistically drawn stock characters of the well-made play and toward complex and torn individuals had found its belated implementation in the theater.

  It speaks to the richness of Ibsen’s oeuvre that these champions of realism were soon joined by young directors of a very different sort: those working in small, avant-garde theaters under the name of symbolism. Foremost among them was Lugné-Poe, whose Théâtre de L’Œuvre focused on a strange new breed of plays that seemed closer to poetry than to drama, including the mysterious plays of Maurice Maeterlinck and Oscar Wilde’s decadent Salomé. This same Lugné-Poe chose to put on, as one of the earliest plays after establishing his theater, two plays by Ibsen: Rosmersholm in 1893 and The Master Builder in 1894. How could Ibsen’s so-called realist plays end up in the company of the aristocratic, biblical, and utterly artificial plays of symbolism? For one, it showed that many of Ibsen’s most ardent defenders, in particular Shaw and Archer, had focused more or less exclusively on his realist plays, such as Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, and Enemy of the People. What was excluded were not only his earlier plays—in particular, his “dramatic poems” Brand and Peer Gynt—but also his later plays, including Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken, which Ibsen subtitled “dramatic epilogue.”

  What drew these diverse directors to Ibsen was the fact that these plays offer an intricate mixture of realist and symbolist modes. In the theater the very distinction between what is a symbol and what is a mere stage prop or technical device is often difficult to make. In Enemy of the People, the poisonous baths can be seen as a device to expose the hypocrisy of the town that profits from them. It turns out, not surprisingly, that the town doesn’t really care about the beneficial effects of the water, but only about profits, and is even ready to suppress the truth if need be. It’s not only the baths; the entire society is poisoned and needs to be cured by the solitary scientist who alone is interested in forcing out the truth. The poisonous cure is more than a simple plot device; it gathers Ibsen’s entire critique of society into one single form.

  Of all of Ibsen’s plays, The Wild Duck is the one that revolves most explicitly around this process by which a simple device or stage prop becomes an objective correlative, something that gathers a whole range of meanings. The play’s title names this correlative, the wild duck, but the play cannot decide what it signifies. In fact, in the final showdown the characters disagree as to how the wild duck relates to the persons and events taking place. Is the wild duck the domesticated father of Hialmar, who is reduced to going hunting in the attic? Is it Hialmar, whose natural strength has been buried underneath his self-deception? Is it Hialmar’s daughter, who owns the duck and who ends up shooting herself instead of shooting the duck, as she had been tempted to do? Devices become charged with meaning, but these meanings can be multiple.

  From the putatively simple device, we can thus move to the device that becomes an objective correlative and then to the objective correlative that becomes multiply charged. This series culminates in what is commonly described as the symbol. Even the objective correlative has not only a function but also a meaning, or several related meanings, and this multiplicity is further increased in such super-correlatives as the wild duck. But even if the play cannot decide on the ultimate meaning of the wild duck—whereas in Enemy of the People the meaning of the poisoned baths is clear—there are at least several comprehensible, if mutually exclusive, possibilities to choose from. Such clear-cut choices are no longer possible when it comes to the symbol. The final and self-destructive ascent onto the newly built tower of the Master Builder Solness may signify many things—his attempt to recapture his youth, his desire to build a real home, simple hubris, his escape from the dilemmas that plague his life—but it cannot be neatly translated into any one of these. They are suggested and hinted at, they variously intermingle, fading in and out of the image, without coming to a stop. Ibsen here takes the technical device, the stage prop, the objective correlative and turns all of these related modes into something much less tangible, something that expresses without allowing for a neat translation. We simply have to absorb this image, or symbol, and let it resonate richly with the play as a whole.

  More fundamental to Ibsen’s technique than the tension between prop and symbol, realism and symbolism, is a second tension that leads into the heart of modernism. Ibsen is the playwright who dared more than any of his contemporary writers to do away with old proprieties, to invent new forms, to break with the past. At the same time, however, his plays are everywhere haunted by this past; even as they announce their desire to escape the past, it always returns—for example, in the form of the character’s childhood and formative experiences. Ibsen’s plays are psychological plays in that they proceed by analyzing characters, by taking them apart layer by layer until these characters’ actions are fully explained.

  The past, however, is never just a question of the individual; it reaches beyond the control of the single character into the past of the family through various lines of inheritance: financial inheritance, biological inheritance, psychological inheritance, moral inheritance. It was Charles Darwin who gave the nineteenth-century obsession with the past and inheritance its scientific form, but his theory is one example of a more widespread consequence or effect of modernity: the return of the past. Attempting to break with the past and consequently being haunted by it is the double gesture that defines Ibsen’s work. The play that manifests this effect particularly well and that refers to it in its title is Ghosts. Even though it is Ibsen’s most radical and provocative play, it is, at the same time, the play most saturated with the return of the past through the deployment of various obscure forms of inheritance, captured under the general theme of the ghost and haunting. As the characters have to find out, it is not up to them to escape the past and to start anew. However much they may try, the past is stronger than their ability to leave it behind.

  The theme of the ghost is perhaps Ibsen’s most lasting commentary on the paradox of modernism and its drama, which he helped inaugurate: Modern drama ends up being turned backward as much as forward, excavating layers and layers of the past as much as imagining some new and entirely different future. Being modern means more than just being current or up to date. It signals a break with history, the sense that the past is fundamentally different and has little to teach the present and th
e future. Ibsen’s plays remind us of the difficulty of being modern, that we cannot have modernism without being haunted by that which modernism wants to leave behind—that modern drama is a drama of ghosts.

  MARTIN PUCHNER is Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and has published in New Literary History, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Criticism, and Theatre Research International, among others. He has written an essay on Joe Orton for Scribner’s Sons’ Encyclopedia of British Writers and has contributed to a collection entitled Avant-Garde: New Perspectives (Rodopi, 2000), as well as to A New History of German Literature (Harvard University Press). His introduction to Lionel Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheater is forthcoming from Holmes and Meier. He has edited two special issues, one with Alan Ackerman on Moderism and Anti-Theatricality (Modern Drama 44:3) and the other on Kafka and the Theater (The Germanic Review, spring 2003). He is currently working on a book-length project on the manifesto as well as on a collection of essays entitled Theater on Trial. He has given public lectures at numerous theaters in New York and has been interviewed in a variety of venues, including National Public Radio.

  PEER GYNT (1867)

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITTEN AFTER HIS FIRST SUCCESS, Brand (1865), Peer Gynt (1867) is Ibsen’s second “dramatic poem,” the second play he wrote after having left Norway and the theater, after deciding to settle in Italy and to write no longer for the stage. This decision to break with the theater, with the perceived limitations imposed by the stage, had an enormously liberating effect. The Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action had become a suffocating set of mechanical rules limiting dramatic literature, and Ibsen realized that a new drama could be written only outside and against the theater. The reading public had different and less rigid expectations than theater producers and audiences, and the printed page lent itself well to fantastic and imaginative material such as the adventures of Peer Gynt, which Ibsen had borrowed from a Norwegian folktale. Ibsen’s decision was unusual, but not unique. There existed a long tradition of reading or closet dramas, including Goethe’s Faust and the Romantic closet dramas of Shelley and Byron, as well as the tradition of the dramatic monologue—a heterogeneous group of plays that have in common their refusal to be put on stage. It is in this tradition that Ibsen placed Peer Gynt, which became an important precursor for the veritable explosion of closet dramas at the turn of the century, with Strindberg’s A Dream Play being probably the best-known example.

  One consequence of Ibsen’s liberation from the stage was that he could write a play that moved freely from the Norwegian mountains to Morocco, developing a plot closer to that of an epic or a novel, one that follows the travels and adventures of a single character across different locales, spanning his entire lifetime from teenage boy to old man. Such dramatic structures would become common for later playwrights such as Strindberg and Brecht, whose plays are therefore called episodic or epic drama. Ibsen not only constructs such an epic plot, he also places at its center a character who thrives on telling stories to embellish reality. Just as Peer Gynt’s stories fashion reality to suit his imagination, so Ibsen uses a narrative or epic drama for a new and imaginative play.

  A second consequence of Ibsen’s choice to write a dramatic poem is even more important but also more surprising: In comparison to Ibsen’s earlier and later plays, Peer Gynt is more, not less, saturated with theatricality. Peer Gynt himself is a liar, a character who creates his own version of reality, his own fantastic world in defiance of all common sense and realism. The most theatrical scene is the one with the trolls; reality and fantasy are so blurred that one simply doesn’t know the difference between them anymore. The troll world itself functions by imposing a different character on reality, by masking and deceiving the senses; in fact, the trolls want to operate on Gynt’s eye so that their temporary charade will become permanent, so that he will see the world their way forever. This is the moment, however, when Gynt runs, because he does not want to accept any fabrication of reality except his own. Just as he had refused the realism of his mother, who wants him to become a good citizen, so he refuses the permanent fantasy of the trolls and chooses his own path, tells his own lies, fashions himself as best as he can until he returns to Norway to die.

  Even though Peer Gynt was not written for the theater, Ibsen’s growing fame, as well as contemporary reforms in theater practice, made directors think about the challenge of putting it on the stage nevertheless. It received its first performance at Christiania in 1876, eleven years after its publication, although the next production didn’t occur until ten years later, in Copenhagen (1886). The first production outside Scandinavia was in Paris by the leading symbolist director Aurelion-Marie Lugné-Poe (1896); it was reviewed favorably by George Bernard Shaw. A notable production took place in London (1911), with a female actor, Pax Robertson, playing Peer Gynt, even though a major London production did not take place until 1922 at the Old Vic.

  It is important to recognize that these productions did not proceed without Ibsen’s approval. Ibsen himself had started to envision Peer Gynt on the stage, but never as regular drama. Instead he had turned to the most prominent Scandinavian composer, Edvard Grieg, and convinced him to write a musical score to go along with a theatrical production; for this purpose, Ibsen was even ready to cut the play substantially. The need for music that Ibsen perceived, however, is also indicative of his continued distrust of the theater. It was not as regular theater that he could imagine Peer Gynt, but only as a tone picture, as something between theater and opera, the latter having always been more amenable to lyrical drama. Peer Gynt’s later success on the stage thus does not retroactively question the wisdom of Ibsen’s retreat from the stage. Rather, it demonstrates how necessary it was for him to recreate the dramatic form, and also how long it took for the theater to eventually catch up with this, his most daring play.

  —Martin Puchner

  CHARACTERS

  ÅSE, a peasant’s widow.

  PEER GYNT, her son.

  TWO OLD WOMEN with corn-sacks. ASLAK, a smith. WEDDING GUESTS. A KITCHEN-MASTER, A FIDDLER, etc.

  A MAN AND WIFE, newcomers to the district.

  SOLVEIG and LITTLE HELGA, their daughters.

  THE FARMER AT HEGSTAD.

  INGRID, his daughter.

  THE BRIDEGROOM and HIS PARENTS.

  THREE SÆTER-GIRLS. A GREEN-CLAD WOMAN.

  THE OLD MAN OF THE DOVRË.

  A TROLL-COURTIER. SEVERAL OTHERS. TROLL-MAIDENS and TROLL-URCHINS. A COUPLE OF WITCHES. BROWNIES, NIXIES, GNOMES, etc.

  AN UGLY BRAT. A VOICE IN THE DARKNESS. BIRD-CRIES.

  KARI, a cottar’s wife.

  Master COTTON, Monsieur BALLON, Herren VON EBERKOPF and TRUMPETERSTRÅLE, gentlemen on their travels. A THIEF and A RECEIVER.

  ANITRA, daughter of a Bedouin chief.

  ARABS, FEMALE SLAVES, DANCING-GIRLS, ETC.

  THE MEMNON-STATUE (singing). THE SPHINX AT GIZEH (muta persona).

  PROFESSOR BEGRIFFENFELDT, Dr. phil., director of the madhouse at Cairo.

  HUHU, a language-reformer from the coast of Malabar. HUSSEIN, an eastern Minister. A FELLAH, with a royal mummy.

  SEVERAL MADMEN, with their KEEPERS.

  A NORWEGIAN SKIPPER and HIS CREW. A STRANGE PASSENGER.

  A PASTOR. A FUNERAL-PARTY. A PARISH-OFFICER. A BUTTON-MOULDER. A LEAN PERSON.

  (The action, which opens in the beginning of the present [that is the nineteenth] century, and ends towards our own days [1867], takes place partly in Gudbrandsdale, and on the mountains around it, partly on the coast of Morocco, in the desert of Sahara, in a madhouse at Cairo, at sea, etc.)