Adapted from Ibsen, Volume II: Four Plays (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1996)
... The author of The Pillars of Society and of The Doll's House, of Ghosts, of The Wild Duck, of Hedda Gabler, is destined to be adored by the 'profession' [He] will remain intensely dear to the actor and the actress. He cuts them out work to which the artistic nature in them joyously responds - work difficult and interesting, full of stuff and opportunity. The opportunity that he gives them is almost always to do the deep and delicate thing - the sort of challenge that, in proportion as they are intelligent, they are most on the look out for. (Henry James: 'On the Occasion of 'Hedda Gabler' June 1891)
Henry James was closely involved in the stormy introduction of Ibsen to the London theatre in the decade beginning in 1889. As an ally of William Archer, Ibsen's translator and ardent advocate, and as the personal friend of Elizabeth Robins, the American actress then pioneering the 'New Drama' in London, he not only promoted the Ibsen cause in articles and reviews but took an active interest in the production of the plays. In a review of The Master Builder in February 1893 he noted Ibsen's "peculiar blessedness to actors.... No dramatist of our time has had the secret, and has kept it better, of making their work interesting to them." He also noted how, in performance, an "extraordinary process of vivification takes place; the conditions seem essentially enlarged."
At the end of that decade, in 1900, James Joyce - a lifelong admirer of Ibsen - insisted, in his youthful review of When We Dead Awaken "if any plays demand the stage they are the plays of Ibsen... because they are so packed with thought... It is to prevent excessive pondering that Ibsen requires to be acted." Like Henry James, he saw the coexistence in Ibsen's drama of meticulous and delicate observation, yet also of the enlargement of the drama's terms:
"Ibsen's plays do not depend for their interest on the action, or on the incidents. Even the characters, faultlessly drawn though they be, are not the first thing in his plays. But the naked drama - either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or of a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance - this is what primarily rivets our attention."
Both authors, then, noted a remarkable feature of Ibsen's dramas that becomes more apparent in the performance. Though the subject matter of the plays is the confined and reduced scene of nineteenth-century middle-class life - and mostly domestic life at that - the plays "open up" and explore the terms of a wide-ranging dramatic argument. Ibsen's realist method, as Joyce detected, expands from the innermost thoughts and feelings of individuals to the "great questions" and "great conflicts" of a universal human drama. How his dramatic method reveals the large subject in the small, the universal in the particular, is not a matter of interpretation or translation only: It is the key to the power of the plays in performance.
Ibsen, himself a painter, was a contemporary of the Realist movement in painting - Impressionism - in which the 'subject' loses its importance, while the artistic act itself becomes the subject. In Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (1984), Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner observe of Impressionism:
If contemporary life was to be represented with its banality, ugliness and mediocrity undistorted, then the aesthetic interest had to be shifted from the objects represented to the means of representation. This is the justification of the indissoluble tie of mid-nineteenth century Realism to art for art's sake; and though it is sometimes seen as an odd contradiction in Realism, it is, in fact, the condition of its existence.
Middle-class life "with its banality, ugliness and mediocrity" is the subject of Ibsen's art. Its invariable 'means of representation' is the revelation of repressed or evaded dimensions to our cultural identity behind images of familiar reality . This procedure, creating the perspectives from which to 'see' the subject adequately, is what I have termed the Supertext of his plays; its emergence is the reason why, in reading and in performance, the "conditions seem essentially enlarged." Seeing archetypal dimensions to modern humanity may be no more true of its identity than modernity's less ambitious self-image: but it is arguably more adequate to our need, generating more liberating fictions to live by than those we have settled for. In the Realist Cycle the repressively confined and limited scene of our everyday existence is revealed to be an meeting ground of universal spiritual forces. For this reason, an acting method that renders convincingly the texture and rhythm of everyday reality need not sacrifice the larger dimensions of the dramas. The Cycle's function is to get modern life to speak a more adequate, more liberating, language.
Ibsen's champions argued his plays required a new kind of acting (for which the traditional profession, in the 1890's was unprepared) because they dramatized a new and unsettling vision of the human condition. George Bernard Shaw insisted on the unsuitability of the old acting style for the New Drama - a theme taken up by William Archer and by Elizabeth Robins in Ibsen and the Actress (1928). The tremendous care with which the Ibsen plays were translated and prepared for performance despite pitifully impoverished means, the great respect for the author's text, and the evolution of a critical discipline to introduce, interpret, and champion the plays in the face of a hostile public constituted a collaborative discipline between the scholars, critics, actors, and actresses that stood in extreme contrast to the cavalier indifference to the text of the traditional theater.
Most later poetic drama in English derived from the Elizabethan theatre in which implausible plotting and a reckless disregard for formal unity was amply compensated for by a dramatic language capable of resonantly articulating every shade of experience. The drama existed primarily for this art of poetic-rhetorical delivery in which the "classical" actor was trained. By the nineteenth century, poetic-rhetorical drama had degenerated into an escapist, posturing costume drama utterly remote from the realities of modern industrial-capitalist society. Productions of Shakespeare on the commercial stage consisted of a handful of plays only, drastically "adapted" to the needs of extravagantly gorgeous staging and the ambition and vanity of actor-managers. Shaw remarked that if Henry Irving were to present himself on stage in as mutilated a condition as he presented Shakespeare's text a shriek of horror would go up from the entire audience.
In the late nineteenth century the theatre in Britain was emerging from an extended period of social disrepute. For well over a hundred years, during the great flowering in Britain of Romantic poetry and the novel, no significant new drama appeared. The popular theater of the time was the very raffish melodrama. This inherited from the older poetic drama a conflict between endangered innocence and lurid evil, watched over by a universe intervening, after a sequence of violent reversals, finally and astonishingly on the side of innocence. The acting style of this theatre necessarily was broad in the extreme.
The more discriminating middle classes who had stayed away from the theatre for over a century, gradually were wooed back by sophisticated and fashionable "well-made plays" plagiarized from Paris and bowdlerized in Britain. This was the timid strategy of a London theatre anxious to appeal to the largest possible public and desperate to escape its earlier, more disreputable condition by seeking middle-class approval and social respectability. It was a theatre terrified of alienating any section of its public by the slightest hint of subversive or "dangerous" subject matter. Fashionable playwrights and theater critics, anxious to protect an immensely lucrative trade, were vigilant against anything that might flutter the dovecotes of the bourgeoisie.
How could a theatre, so terrified of controversy, satisfy the new audience's need for dramatic interest? As with Hollywood and Broadway today, the Parisian formula was to provide the maximum theatrical excitement with the minimum of intellectual risk. This meant presenting, through the perspective of a rigidly conventional morality and by means of technically artful plots, the perennial subjects of adultery and criminality in the fashionable classes. A favorite subject was 'the woman with a past' attempting social rehabilitation through marriage only to be destroyed by the revelation of earlier sexual transgression - a plot eerily echoing the British theatre's own precarious bid for social acceptance. The sexuality in the British adaptations of the Parisian well-made play was so muted by the queasiness of the actor-managers and the watchfulness of the official Censor of Plays that most of the point of the risqué originals was lost. It was considered a daring extension of the drama when Paula Tanqueray, the woman with a past in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) was permitted a sympathetic measure of conventional self-condemnation before her inevitable disgrace. Oscar Wilde's attempt to infiltrate daring commentary on society's mores into his otherwise conventional well-made melodramas ended with his own social disgrace and ruin - which only reinforced the theatre's extreme alarm over even the mildest challenge to the status quo. However a cultural "space" was emerging into which a dramatist, independent of the London commercial theatrical scene, could step.
Henry James' account of actors and actresses eager to be engaged on work of aesthetic integrity was true, also, of a new minority audience. In the 1890's, when the drama was almost universally considered an unfit medium for serious writing, Ibsen was avidly taken up and championed, against astonishingly intense hostility, by those hungry for a theatre into which one could take one's intellect. Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce were among the many who, with the progressive men and women in Europe (and later America), enlisted in the cause of Ibsen and the Independent Theatre movement. In 1886, Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, with William Morris' daughter, May, and the rising socialist of the New Criticism, Bernard Shaw, took part in a Bloomsbury reading of A Doll House.
The minority theatre, the cradle of serious modern drama, came into being in Berlin (1889) and London in 1891 to perform Ibsen's Ghosts. In Paris, Antoine's recently inaugurated Theatre Libre staged Ghosts in 1890 and George Moore, in the audience, was so overwhelmed by the play he became a founding member of a new Irish Literary Theatre - later to become the Abbey Theatre. With Ibsen's plays, therefore, the modern theatre now followed the other arts by splitting into mutually hostile mainstream and minority publics. In those heady days, performing an Ibsen play was considered virtually an insurrectionary act, and Ibsen became the most vilified, championed, talked, and written about individual in Europe for decades. "It may be questioned," wrote James Joyce in his review of When We Dead Awaken, "whether any man has held so firm an empire over the thinking world in modern times." Within an astonishingly short period the theatre, through Ibsen, shook off its insignificance and disrepute to become a major cultural force in Europe.
Anthologies of modern drama, eager to construct neat linear accounts of dramatic evolution, usually place Ibsen at the beginning of the collection as 'the father of modern realism' - which already means ignoring the half of his career in which he created major poetic and historical dramas. Furthermore, his 'realistic' plays usually are seen as worthy exercises in a discipline - the faithful depiction of real people in real trouble - that later realists were to refine. It was fashionable to decry the 'heaviness' of Ibsen's method while applauding the latest modish arrival on Broadway or the West End. Any visit to the volumes of 'The Best Plays' of 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, to the present day confirms the short shelf life of these lauded offerings and of their reviewers; whereas the architectural integrity of Ibsen's art maintains him, after a century, as a potent presence in our theatre and culture. However, it is still necessary to demonstrate that Ibsen's Realist method is an audaciously poetic method that the modern theater hardly has begun to comprehend.
The Ibsen plot's non-naturalistic timing, compression, ironic patterning of co-incidences, abrupt confrontations, are not unfortunate residues from the formulae of the well-made-play. Ibsen is not offering a facsimile of everyday life and then, through recidivisms to the old melodrama, failing to achieve the miniscule tics and nuances of slice of life realism. The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of an insistent aesthetic structuring whose artifices need not be denied. As in Oedipus tyrannos, past events now take the form of mentally re-enacted agons on-stage. Recollected urgently by the plot, they become intense realities of the present, transformed now in the light of newly awakened consciousness. Past events take on reality only as objects of present consciousness. This re-enactment of the earlier events also is a redemption of the past, an assertion of freedom over the past by the protagonists . What had been ignorantly suffered or lost in the past now can be recovered and transcended freely, even though painfully, by the enlightened consciousness. The audience, from its privileged position as spectator, follows the trajectory of the protagonists' experience. There is no 'message' to be gained from this: only the experience of a human situation explored in adequate depth through a superb artistry. In Sophokles' beautifully constructed tragedy Oedipus could not change the events that condemned him but he was free to discover and acknowledge their tragic truth and to pass judgment upon himself. Ibsen’s twelve play Realist Cycle is the conversion of thiis plot to a huge communal tribunal.
The past stories that are resurrected through the plots represent an area of the arbitrary, the accidental and external, the realm of seemingly free, spontaneous actions often exhibiting rich variety of detail. It is only when they are reconfigured as plots that the events of the stories reveal the 'closed' dialectical structures of inevitable conflict, logical necessity, design, nemesis. The Ibsen plot is the operation upon reality of a combination of the dialectic and an aesthetically demanding structuring. There is no need to conceal its artifices: the movement of each act of a play to its peripeties and anagnoreses, its repetition of key words and phrases, its 'curtain lines' and so on. The artifices should be acknowledged as the intellectual and imaginative process Ibsen's plots bring to his fictive material. They are intrinsic to his greatness and to our satisfaction with his art. The conjunction of convincing human characters and situations and at the same time the skillful retention of classic dramatic structure accounts for much of the dramas' power.
'Real life' individuals can be the subjects of psycho-analytical case books compiled slowly and methodically from the mutual interrogations of analyst and analysand over many years. Fictive characters, by contrast have no existence outside the artwork, no psyches to be analysed and no recourse against those who elect to pronounce on their moral or psychological make-up. A child admonishing a doll reveals the deeply rooted human instinct to endow fictive characters and situations with 'real life’ attributes. Much well-established commentary on Ibsen’s characters - his ‘Women’, (less frequently his ‘Men’) - is a version of this instinct. It is an amiable escapist hobby, freed from the obligation to objectively establish its forthright opinions and judgments; it should not masquerade as a critical discipline of any rigor. Too often studies that commend Ibsen for the rightness of his attitudes are really proclamations of the writer’s own: it is a form of washing one’s clean linen in public. (1)
A Nora Helmer or a Thomas Stockmann can so possess the imagination that it is easy to forget these are the elements of an artwork (the play) whose imperative is to create significance through formal structure . It is only as a supreme dramatic artist that Ibsen has maintained his commanding place in our culture. Ibsen commentary is in no need of more exercises of more seals of moral approval or disapproval from commentators eager to recruit Ibsen to their personal ideologies. This, essentially, removes Ibsen’s alarming and estranging qualities. These qualities were better understood by those who earlier violently protested against his plays: it is almost as if these opponents decided the better tactic is to interpret them as anodyne liberalism. This development drove Rainer Maria Rilke to pronounce:
"Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have cause up
with you because of your fame. A little while ago they were against you body and
soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they pull your words around with
them in the cages of their presumption, and tease them a little, from a safe distance.
All you terrifying wild beasts." (2)
The academic appropriation of a major artist is always on the appropriators’ own terms. To adequately analyse Ibsen’s art, however, requires venturing beyond our comfortable ideological categories, being prepared to encounter the alien and unsettling and submitting to the difficult discipline of close reading and rigorous aesthetic attention. It is much easier to discourse on his ideology, the disposition of his characters, his 'Women' (more rarely his 'Men') in terms of the received opinions of the day.
All an artist can do - but it is much - is to liberate our aesthetic perceptions; "to open the Doors of Perception" in Willaim Blake's phrase. The good artist does this through the integrity of the art form. What 'insights' we might glean from the plays will have value only if they are arrived at via a disciplined and imaginative labor by the artist and a similarly demanding journey on our part. We should not too readily assume Ibsen shares our way of seeing the world or that he would endorse our most cherished values. It is . when it makes us most uncomfortable that his art could be most valuable to us. Ibsen declared his lifework was to wrestle with the trolls that infest the mind and heart and hold a Judgment Day over the soul. To this sessions in the Cycle of twelve plays, our nature and history as a species is summoned. Each man (and woman) shares in the guilt of his/her society as a whole, he wrote: there is no innocent race, gender or class. His dramatic method of devising a dialectical plot structure that revisits past events through a disquietingly awakened consciousness, is the artistic expression of this vision. This is the essence of his entire drama, the 'Ibsen Secret' - and his plays cannot be understood unless we grasp this procedure. It is the dialectical procedure, also, of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind. In Hegel, the enlightened philosophic mind or spirit (the reader) returns to and re-enacts the essential stages of its evolving consciousness. To this action Ibsen invented his own immensely rich and profoundly inhabited realm of characters and conflicts and rendered them so compellingly that his imaginative world has become our own. And, in strong contrast with the philosopher, he did this in works of impressive beauty.
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(1) Cf. Toril Moi. Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford: University Press, 2006. Joan Templeton similarly feels a critical responsibility to commend Ibsen’s thoroughly conventional liberal crusade in her essay 'Advocacy and Ambivalence in Ibsen’s Drama' (Ibsen Studies Vol. VII No.1) pp 43-60. While big claims are made for Ibsen as a dispenser of enlightened opinions, no mention is made by either commentator on the nature of his artistic accomplishment: the reason why we study Ibsen in the first place.
(2) cf. Ibsen’s Selected Plays (A Norton Critical Edition, 2004) 544.
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