Henrik Ibsen: An Enemy of the People (1882)

Translation: Eleanor Max-Aveling
Edition: Heinemann, 1907
Review number: 1203

In most of his plays, Ibsen's major concern seems to be the depiction of hypocrisy. It is possible to expand this obvious idea into something which is an important part of even more of his works - he was interested in the relationship between the public and private aspects of people's personalities. Thus in Peer Gynt, the central character is unable to repress his inner childlikeness and rebels against developing an outer shell of an acceptable adult; Hedda Gabler, in the play bearing her name, is similarly unwilling to accept the changes society requires of her as a newly married woman; and in Brand an iron hard Puritan begins with his inner and outer selves in harmony but has his certainty chipped away by the events that unfold in the play. In An Enemy of the People, however, the central character is one whose inner and outer selves are the same and remain so throughout, while the hypocrites around him seek to make him compromise and then, when he refuses, try to destroy him and his reputation.

Dr Stockmann lives in a provincial Norwegian town (they continued to provide the setting for many of Ibsen's plays even after he moved to Italy), and was one of the main instigators of a plan to build a therapeutic baths, turning the town into a (hopefully soon to be fashionable) spa. The baths have recently been completed, but Stockmann has learnt that cost-cutting in the building has meant that the water supply is contaminated. For the long term good of the town, he wants to see the baths closed down and the water supply improved before a patient becomes seriously ill, causing a scandal. However, the leading men of the town refuse to listen, thinking only of the short term financial damage this would cause. (They are not so much to blame for this as a modern audience might think, as the idea of disease carrying bacteria invisible to the naked eye was far less well established in 1882, and was probably something of a novelty to a provincial capitalist.)

Of all the characters in Ibsen's plays, Stockmann is the one most frequently cited as a self-portrait. There are certainly many aspects of the character which match up with Ibsen's perception of himself. An example is the best known line from the play ("The minority is always right"), in which Stockmann declares that he will always be in the minority not to say that he is contrary in nature but that he is the kind of progressive who is always ahead of the majority, so that he will have moved on by the time they have caught up with his views. In fact, Ibsen apparently deliberately made the character of this man who was to put forward his own ideas as unlike himself as possible to increase the impact of what he says; he is, for example, exuberant where Ibsen himself was rather melancholic.

The play itself was wrtten in part as a response to the criticism heaped upon Ghosts, his previous drama, which had provoked a scandal that created the dramatist's international reputation. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen turns what he considered the rotten centre of bouregois Norway into the metaphor or symbol or the corruption polluting the baths which are heralded as the heart of the town's future. Much of the central act, a town meeting addressed by Stockmann, was inspired by a particular remark made by fellow dramatist Bjornsen in a criticism of Ghosts, that the "majority always has right on its side".

This particular translation is one of the series made under the auspices of Ibsen fanatic William Archer, who oversaw the first English publications of many if not all of Ibsen's plays. (Indeed, several of the original Norwegian language versions were first published by Archer, so that Ibsen could take advantage of the British participation in international copyright treaties that Norway was not yet party to.) Many of these translations now appear stilted and wordy, but this one is still remarkably easy to read. I'm not sure it would work so well on the stage, since readability and performability are two quite different things.

Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler (1890)

Translation: Una Ellis-Fermor, 1950
Edition: Penguin, 1961
Review number: 847

The character of Hedda is in some ways an inversion of that of Nora in The Dollshouse. Nora starts out as the quiet, dutiful wife, and is eventually driven to rebellion by the bourgeois conventionality of her husband. Hedda was a society success who married a wrong choice after the death of her father, and who is very quickly crushed by his dullness.

Hedda and her new husband, Jörgen Terman, begin the play by returning to Norway from their honeymoon. (The fact that Hedda is generally known by her maiden name is significant of her attitude to her marriage.) It is almost immediately clear from her interaction with Tesman's maiden aunts (who brought him up) that there is a wide social divide between them, and her conversation with the urbane Judge Brack reveals that there is a similar gap in terms of their interests. Brack's aim is to pressurise Hedda into accepting him as her lover, something that she is unwilling to do because she doesn't want anyone to have power over her.

This is really the character background; the plot itself is about the attempts of a former suitor of Hedda's, Ejlert Lövborg, to put his life back together after succumbing to alcoholism. While the Termans were away on their honeymoon, he has produced a book (on the history of culture), which has taken the town by storm. His rehabilitation was the result of the inspiration given him by Thea Elvsted, who was at school with Hedda but who doesn't remember her as a friend. Hedda manipulates Lövborg into returning to his self-destructive hedonism, and by taunting him about a lack of courage when he thought about killing himself when earlier rejected by Hedda, eventually drives him to suicide; at the same time, she destroys the manuscript of his new book, which should prove even more original. This is all because of jealousy over the fact that he has found true love with Thea, a girl she has always despised.

There was always an important place for the individual in Ibsen's work (think of both Brand and Peer Gynt among his early plays, both about how an individual expresses himself). The social plays such as The Dollshouse are often about the relationship between an individual and society as a whole, and particularly about the difference between private and public morality. By the time he wrote Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's focus has moved back to his earlier theme of the expression of individuality; the difference between Hedda and Peer is that Peer Gynt is trying to work out who he is while Hedda knows her identity but is increasingly unable to express it except destructively. She is so much the centre of the play that there is far less symbolic context than usual in Ibsen's work; the main symbols have to do with posterity and children (Lövborg's new manuscript is called his child; Tesman's aunts are tremendously excited by the idea that Hedda might be pregnant). Thus the portrayal of Hedda is of vital importance to the production of the play, and it is a pity that the one performance I have seen (Fiona Shaw in the mid-nineties) was rather marred by turning it into melodrama.

Henrik Ibsen: The Pillars of the Community (1877)

Translation: Una Ellis-Fermor, 1950 (Buy from Amazon)
Edition: Penguin, 1964
Review number: 844

Also known in English as The Pillars of Society, this play is really the start of the series of plays with social messages which so scandalised nineteenth century Europe. It is a vicious attack on the complacent hypocrisy of Norwegian small town society, especially on the "it couldn't happen here" attitude taken towards the scandals of the wider world.

Karsten Bernick runs a shipping firm in a coastal town, an important business as the railway doesn't yet pass through it. His wealth and eminence is based on a lie; by pretending that his family's rumoured hidden wealth (in fact non-existent) had been stolen by his brother in law Johan T&oumlaut;nnesen, who emigrated to the US, he was able to persuade creditors that he was suffering only a temporary loss and compound with them until his business became more healthy. No one, not even his wife, knows the truth, but now T&oumlaut;nnesen is returning to Norway. At the same time, two other scandals seem to be about to break; the railway is coming, and Bernick has bought the land along its route cheaply, standing to make a huge profit; and he has accepted work at his shipyard that cannot possibly be done in the time allowed, which means that shoddy repairs are likely to lead to loss of life.

It is not just Bernick who is a hypocrite; all of this around him who might be considered pillars of the community, are really as bad. The only honest adult among the characters native to the town is Bernick's foreman Aune, and he is forced by the threat of dismissal to make the poor quality ship repairs against his better judgment.

One of Ibsen's themes is the passing of corruption from father to son, and it can be seen in a mild form in this play in Olaf, Bernick's son, who is keen to travel, to take part in the modern world, and at one point is thought to have stowed away on the dangerous ship.

The main purpose of the play is the attack on the complacent superiority of the relatively unsophisticated Norwegian bourgeois, and it succeeds admirably, paving the way for the greater plays to come.

Asbjorn Aarseth: Text and Performance: Peer Gynt and Ghosts (1989)

Edition: MacMillan, 1989 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 701

As part of a series aimed at sixth form and undergraduate study of drama, Aarseth writes about two of Ibsen's best known plays, Peer Gynt and Ghosts. They are both among his more complex, though the have little else in common. Parts of Peer Gynt, in particular, can seem almost incomprehensible, and it often seems especially strange on stage. (It was written to be read rather than performed, like Goethe's Faust.)

The structure of the book is to discuss the text of each play first, and then their performance histories, with two case studies for each (one Scandinavian, one in London). Each section is really too short for a detailed discussion to develop, and Aarseth concentrates on one aspect in the textual analysis, the themes which are frequently lost in translation from Norwegian. Much is made, for example, of the animal imagery in Peer Gynt. Traditional animal metaphors are difficult to translate, because they carry meanings beyond their literal words, and often the sense is retained in translation at the expense of the animal. This is quite important, because the major theme of the play is the nature of human as opposed to animal nature.

Most of what Aarseth has to say is interesting; the problem is that it is not enough. Even concentrating on certain aspects of each play, he can only be relatively sketchy, and there are many interesting questions about which he has nothing to say at all. By fitting into what I suspect are the confines of the series, the interest of the book is diminished.

Henrik Ibsen: The Master Builder (1892)

Translation: Michael Meyer, 1961
Edition: Methuen
Review number: 36

The Master Builder is one of Ibsen's later plays, and presumably shares some of the themes and preoccupations of The Lady From the Sea, with which it shares the character of Hilde Wangel.

Halvard Solness is a well known builder, a master builder, who has driven many of his rivals out of business in the course of his long career. He is currently building a house for himself and his wife, Aline, to be a home to properly replace Aline's family house which burnt down some years ago killing his twin baby sons. This is to be the culmination of his artistry, and will be an unusual house with a tall spire - Solness has become more and more obsessed with spires as he has got older. (The obvious psycho-sexual idea is clearly intended here.)

Solness also has a predilection for the society of young women. His book-keeper is Kaja Fosli, who is engaged to Ragnar Brovik. Brovik is the son of one of the men forced out of business by Solness, and acts as a draughtsman to Solness. Brovik has completed some excellent designs for a new house, and Solness' approval will enable him to set up on his own and marry Kaja, neither of which are events Solness wants to happen. He has a morbid fear of young men coming up and overtaking his business, as he did to older men some years before. (There are shades of Ibsen's distrust for the younger generation of playwrights in this.)

This situation of building tension is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of Hilde Wangel. Ten years before, when only fourteen, she watched Solness climb the spire of the new church in her home town. She managed to get him to promise to return to take her away in ten years time, a promise instantly forgotten by Solness but the mainstay of Hilde's emotional life. The ten years up, Solness did not appear, so Hilde came in search of him.

Now, though, she discovers that Solness is no longer the man she thought him to be. He has become terrified of heights, and will no longer climb spires as he used to - indeed, he has difficulty remembering that he ever did. She persuades him to climb the spire of the new house, but he falls, and is killed to end the play.

As can be seen, the play is full of symbols and resonances with Ibsen's own life. Apart from the distrust of young people, Ibsen also enjoyed the company of young women in his old age. It is thus more personal than many of his other plays, which deal with perhaps more universal themes. Having said that, the theme of aging is one which comes to us all in the end.

Henrik Ibsen: The Wild Duck (1884)

Translation: Michael Meyer (Methuen, 1961) /Una Ellis-Fermor (Penguin, 1959)
Edition: Methuen, 1961 / Penguin, 1959
Review number: 35

The Meyer translation of this play is one of his poorest, and leaves it quite difficult to understand what it is about at all, even when familiar with several of Ibsen's plays. Ellis-Fermor makes it much clearer, partly because the Penguin Classics translations are principally intended to be read rather than performed.

The Wild Duck tells the story of two families, the Werles and Ekdals. The Ekdals are poor, Old Ekdal having been ruined in business by Haakon Werle. The young, idealistic Gregers, son of Haakon Werle comes to stay with the Ekdals after a quarrel with his father. He is aware, though the Ekdals are not, that Gina, wife of his contemporary Hjalmar Ekdal, was previously his father's mistress and that is why Hjalmar was provided with the funds to enable him to set himself up as a photographer. He reveals his knowledge, for he believes that no true marriage can be based on a lie as this one has been, and this causes the destruction of the household.

One of the strange things about the Ekdal household, and the idea with which The Wild Duck stops being a naturalistic play similar to the plays that had immediately preceded it, is that they have an attic containing all sorts of animals, and in particular a wild duck rescued from the hunting of Haakon Werle, unable to fly because of the injuries it received from his dog.

The other member of the household is Hjalmar and Gina's young daughter, Hedvig, who is going blind. The symbols of the wild duck and of Hedvig's blindness (due to a hereditary complaint, a common theme in Ibsen's work) are crucial to an understanding of the play. The wild duck symbolises something to do with freedom, which Old Ekdal has lost in his disgrace and which his son's household can never have because of his economic dependence on Werle. The bird has been crippled by Werle, and in its company Old Ekdal seeks his former happiness, as he carries out mock hunts, killing rabbits in the attic instead of the bears he once sought in the forest.

One thing is clear even in Meyer's translation: Ibsen was being distinctly critical of the idealistic view that ends justify means, and of insufficiently thought-out idealism. that places principles above psychological understanding. Gregers' revelations, made with excellent intentions, destroy the Ekdal family, particularly bringing misery to the innocent and doomed Hedvig, who cannot understand why her father is suddenly repulsed by her; she is too young to be told that he has just discovered that he might not be her father. The play is her tragedy, and her story is a powerful one.

Henrik Ibsen: Ghosts (1881)

Translation: Michael Meyer, 1962

Edition: Methuen
Review number: 34

At the time when Ghosts first appeared, it was considered extremely dangerous and indecent. The themes it contains of inherited illness (siphylis, though this is never directly stated) and hypocrisy were unacceptable to the later nineteenth century audience, even to those who considered themselves liberals and had championed Ibsen's earlier plays.

The story of the play is that of a young man, who returns home from the bohemian life of an artist because he is suffering from a mysterious illness. He has been brought up abroad, and has always believed, as the world in general has believed, that his father was a pillar of the community. He begins to fall in love with his mother's maid.

His mother is extremely alarmed when she realises what is happening. She is the only one who really knows what her dead husband was like, and she knows that he was in fact the father of the serving girl. There are parallels between her past history and the story of Nora in The Dollshouse; she too tried to leave her husband, though he was far more unpleasant than Nora's. She, however, was persuaded to return by the local church minister, with whom she had sought refuge. For the sake of her son, she spent the rest of her life covering up the truth about her husband.

The story very powerfully brings out its themes, but is very much less shocking than it seemed over a hundred years ago. It is still a play which makes one think about what you really inherit from your parents, anticipating Philip Larkin's famous poem by many years.

Henrik Ibsen: The Pretenders (1864)

Editions: Methuen, 1964; Oxford University Press, 1962
Translations:Michael Meyer (Methuen); Evelyn Ramsden & Glynne Wickham (OUP)
Updated: 11 February 2000
Review number: 20

The Pretenders is another early Ibsen play, the earliest included in the Methuen series of Ibsen plays translated by Michael Meyer. It is a historical play dealing with a thirteenth century civil war in Norway. (The fact that it deals with Norwegian history is an explanation for its much greater popularity in Norway than elsewhere, though no knowledge of Norwegian history is needed to understand the play.)

Basically, the plot concerns a young king of slightly dubious legitimacy and the powerful nobleman who has acted as his regent since his birth. After his coming of age ceremony (at which his mother dramatically submits to trial by ordeal to prove his legitimacy), the King Haakon and his ex-regent Earl Skule start to drift apart, aided by the political manoeuvrings of the head of the Norwegian church, Bishop Nicholas.

Haakon has a radical new idea - to unite the whole of Norway as a country, to inspire people to care for the country as a whole rather than only their local neighbourhood; up to this point, the king has been viewed as the head of a group of local chieftains. Skule is enthralled by the idea, and seeks to make it his own. He is frustrated to realise that just as Haakon is more politically advanced than he is - as the man who conceived the idea - so Earl Skule is more advanced than his associates, who are unable to comprehend the idea of a united Norway. (After all, haven't the men of one town always been enemies of those of another?)

One of the main themes of the play is the meaning of patriotism, and the eventual victory of Haakon shows the capacity of the national idea to inspire. As an early work, there is not much criticism of nationalism, as you would perhaps expect of Ibsen later on, though the parochialism of the various parts of Norway could be seen as a criticism of the parochialism of Norway as a whole in Ibsen's time. Ibsen is perhaps most critical of the church; the bishop is the only character with no real nobility.

In some ways, Michael Meyer's translation is beginning to seem rather dated, yet Evelyn Ramsden and Glynne Wickham's does not, despite its greater age. This is because the OUP translation is much more aimed at production. (Meyer's translation has been staged, but I would imagine that it would seem rather stilted without further adaptation.) Ramsden and Wickham use stronger, more melodramatic words to emphasise the character of Bishop Nicholas, and the pivotal scene is much more clearly seen to be the one in which his spirit returns from hell to tempt Earl Skule into an act which will destroy the kingdom. The scene is distinctly like that in Peer Gynt in which Peer meets the ominous figure of the button moulder, also representing death and judgment.

Henrik Ibsen: Peer Gynt (1867)

Edition: Methuen
Translation: Michael Meyer, 1963
This is one of the best known of all Ibsen's plays, though perhaps more for the music by Grieg than for the actual play. It's an early play, and is not at all like Ibsen's later works; it is very full of images and not at all realistic; a large part of the action is dramatisation of the imaginings of the main character.
In many respects, the play examines, in Peer, the opposite side of human nature to that scrutinised in Ibsen's previous play, Brand. The character of Brand is too inflexible, too unyielding, too focused on ideals while the character of Peer is almost totally concentrated on the life of the imagination and the stories that he tells. No ideals, almost no morals, no conventions enter his mind. He seduces the bride at a wedding, sets up a new religion in the Arabian desert, attempts to become king of the trolls.

The trolls are an important part of the play, symbolising what Peer so nearly becomes - totally amoral and self-centred. He is offered citizenship (along with the hand of the troll-king's daughter), but refuses to allow himself to be maimed in the way they insist (harming his eyes). So far he will go - wearing a tail, acting in a troll-like way - but no further. What saves Peer is the love of two good women - his mother, Aase, and the pure and innocent Solveig. She ends up waiting her whole life for him to return from his trip abroad, which leads him to an insane asylum in Egypt as well as the Arabian desert.
One perennial critical question about Peer Gynt is to name the moment at which Peer dies - is it in the lunatic asylum, or in the shipwreck on the journey back to Denmark, or after returning to the arms of Solveig. Michael Meyer thinks it is the asylum, because afterwards he is continually meeting characters symbolising death (the button-moulder, who remakes unworthy souls, and the stranger on ship who appears during the storm which wrecks it). I'm not sure I agree. There are so many things which take place in the imagination of Peer before this that to say something cannot really be happening doesn't make much sense.

Henrik Ibsen: Emperor and Galilean (1870)

Edition: Methuen, 1986
Translation: Michael Meyer, 1986
Emperor and Galilean is Ibsen's longest play, consisting of two five act parts, Caesar's Apostasy and Julian Emperor. It is also the last history play he wrote, being a fairly accurate account of the career of the Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate.
Julian was brought up a Christian and as heir (Caesar) to the Empire by Constantius, who had murdered most of Julian's family for political reasons. He was sickened by the hypocrisy and pettiness of the Christian church of the time, much as Ibsen was in his own day, and was attracted by the comparitively virtuous pagans. He became involved with a pagan mystic, Maximus, who told him that he would be the founder of the "third empire", following the pagan Roman empire and the Christian empire of the Galilean, Jesus.
He became Emperor and began to restore the pagan religion of Rome. His persecution of the church brought unity, purity and virtue back to it. He found that he might rule men's bodies, but the Galilean ruled men's hearts. Evenutually he was killed in a campaign against the Persian empire, and was succeeded by the Christian Jovian, so that his reforms came to nothing.
Emperor and Galilean occupied Ibsen over many years. It doesn't seem to me to be as great as many of his other plays; perhaps the historical nature of the play constrained him too much, making it impossible to alter the plot to make his points more telling. It deals with the themes of choice and freedom which were extremely important to Ibsen, and which it shares with other plays from the same period, notably Brand and Peer Gynt. Both these plays work better in my opinion, and Ibsen's abandonment of the historical form from this time onwards perhaps shows that he agreed.

Henrik Ibsen: Brand (1866)

Translation: Michael Meyer, 1960
Edition: Methuen, 1960

Brand is a fairly early Ibsen play, in this translation part of the Methuen plays series. This and its companion in the volume Ibsen Plays 5, Emperor and Galilean, are among the earliest Ibsen translations attempted by Meyer, and are clearly meant for performance rather than publication. Both plays are fairly severely cut; in Brand's case, this is to remove the discussion of nineteenth-century Norwegian politics which is likely to be tedious to a modern, non-Scandinavian audience.

The central character is a pastor of the Norwegian state church. He returns to his ancestral home, a small, remote village in a valley overshadowed by the dangerous mountains which surround it. As he arrives, the villagers are on the verge of starvation, and he shows no pity for their state, refusing to give them the food they crave. He blames them for putting the needs of the body above the duty of the spirit, which in his mind is due to a hard and vengeful God. He does, however, show great personal courage in crossing the fjord in a storm to give a householder his last rites. This act leads the villagers to ask him to become their pastor. He is mocked by the gypsy girl, Gerd, who tells him that the "ice-church" up in the mountains is far greater and more beautiful than the ugly village church.

In the second act - Brand has a lot of plot! - he has married a woman named Agnes and has a son, Ulf. The son is dying, and the doctor tells Brand and Agnes that he will live if they leave the village and move to the south. After a struggle within himself, viewing this as temptation to give up his calling, Brand refuses to leave the village, and Ulf dies. The third act takes place the following Christmas, when Agnes decorates their house in the way that the child loved. Brand tells her that she must give up her attachment to the dead child and devote herself to his calling, as he (and, indeed, society in general) believed a wife should. A gypsy woman arrives, begging for clothing to warm her freezing young son, and Brand makes Agnes purify herself by giving up all the clothing she has left which belonged to Ulf, her last reminders of her child.

By the fourth act, Agnes too has died, and Brand is putting his energy into building a larger and more beautiful village church. As the work comes to completion, Brand falls into despair as he realises that the church can never be big enough or beautiful enough. He rejects the building, at the moment which everyone around him thinks is his time of triumph. He leads the villagers away from the church into the mountains. Up in the mountains, the villagers abandon him when he is unable to minister to their physical needs - there is a clear contrast with the story of Christ feeding the five thousand, where the gospels say he had compassion on the crowd because of their hunger. Finally, he is left alone with Gerd, who leads him to the ice-church. She fires a rifle and the noise breaks the balance that keeps the ice and snow in a church-like shape, and Brand is destroyed by an avalanche to end the play.

Brand is an incredibly bleak play. There are really no admirable characters; Agnes comes closest perhaps to being so. It is of course a strong attack on the human consequences of the hard-heartedness that so often characterises evangelical Protestantism. Brand has an inadequate picture of God, one which perhaps reflects his own personal inadequacies. Even he, at times, finds the self-sacrifice that he feels his God demands of him almost two much to bear, notably in the second and third acts.

Ibsen's feelings about religion and personal freedom (characters are constantly asked to make choices when they feel there is no choice) play a major role. The ice-church probably represents the negation of love; Brand's uncompromising devotion to duty completely kills off the love which he should feel towards Agnes and Ulf, to the villagers, and above all to his God. (Contrast Peer Gynt in Ibsen's next play, who abandons all that might be considered duty for extreme self-indulgence.)

Altogether, Brand is a challenging play to read, but I felt it was well worth it.