The Ibsen Phenomenon

Ibsen and World Literature
by Brian Johnston

V. Ibsen Today

Ibsen has long since become established as a force in the modern theater and in our cultural life. Ibsen productions take place worldwide; Ibsen conferences are attended by delegates from every inhabited continent. His plays, therefore, must share the fate of other classics: vulnerable to many agendas and subjected to various critical interpretations and metamorphoses on the stage. This particularlythe case with what are touted as 'traanslations' of his plays.  Theater companies farm out performance ‘versions’ to favored writers with no knowledge of Norwegian who then cobble scripts from what are condescendingly called ‘literal translations.’ This results in tamed texts purporting to be by Ibsen but with their challenging original texture removed to ingratiate contemporary tastes.42  English-speaking audiences, therefore, experience Ibsen as a less alienating presence than Norwegians who confront a text whose expressions and conventions, belonging to an earlier phase of Norwegian culture, have not been erased.  

Theater reviewers frequently commend the easy accessibility of such versions as if easy accessibility is an essential feature of Ibsen's art. Theater professionals understandably prefer texts where audiences quickly can feel at home among familiar characters and motives. This, however, give less challenging and interesting work for actors to do and audiences to respond to.   Ibsen's texts are boldly ikmaginative, complex and difficult – and imagination, complexity and difficulty are what the best art is all about. The most damaging versions of Ibsen's plays encourage the view that the range of Ibsen's art is reassuringly ordinary. Translations that strive to be just like our world are unlikely to be just like Ibsen's.

 A major problem for the translator is creating a dialogue that plausibly can be spoken on the modern stage while conveying the contrapuntal nature of Ibsen's art.    In an Ibsen play the ‘realistic' text continuously is infiltrated by a ‘supertext' formed from the cultural and archetypal forces from the past that has created our modern human identity.  This interplay between  the everyday and the archetypal creates a counterpoint formed from the the two perspectives on the human scene, the local and the universal. Scenes, characters, actions and dialogue all contribute to an elaborate textual counterpoint.  

Far less dismaying than the 'versions' that reduce Ibsen's art to the 'ordinary' are the extreme and often bizarre transmogrifications the plays undergo in the experimental theatres. In the German theater, as Marvin Carlson reports, productions use the plays as springboards for wildly irreverent treatment. In one scene in Sebastian Hartmann’s production of Ghosts at the Volksbühne in Berlin, Osvald Alving masturbates to Regina’s erotic poses, and Regina, dressed as a terrorist, guns down Mrs. Alving.43 Such transmutations do not claim to be performing Ibsen’s text but, instead, to be deconstructing it. The same can be said for the version of Hedda Gabler, HEDDATRON, by New York’s underground theater, Les Freres Corbusier, where, one learns, half the roles are played by robots. The performance

‘‘… bounces from robots enacting a doomed staging of Hedda Gabler, to student book reports on Ibsen’s plays, to a mother in Ypsilanti, Michigan, whom the robots abduct to star in their production, to Ibsen’s house, where the playwright lives with his overbearing wife and what the script terms a kitchen slut. The 19th-century Swedish playwright August Strindberg also appears, carrying a sack of used condoms and writing plays with a Sharpie that’s glued to his crotch’’.44

Mike Daisy of Wired Magazine comments on Heddatron:

Elizabeth Meriwether’s strange script cuts to the heart of Ibsen’s story: A woman chained up in her own life struggles to break free of social programming. That struggle is mirrored by the robots who attempt to escape their own programming and achieve true AI - self-awareness. Just as Hedda rails against a world that can’t hear her, the robots represent potential that one day may be unleashed.45

Hedda Gabler as Robotic Realism or Cybernetic Symbolism incontrovertibly sets the seal of modernity on his work. Lee Breuer’s Dollhouse at New York’s Mabou Mines in 2003 was another highly stylized and radical re-interpretation of an Ibsen classic, in which a stately Nora is surrounded by male midgets. Such adaptations actually are a form of cultural canonization. Ibsen, Nora and Hedda have entered the company of world-cultural icons. Deconstruction, after all, is a worthwhile activity only if the object of the exercise is a feature of the cultural landscape easily identifiable in its new guise. Ibsen is well on the way to achieving Shakespearean universality where he must be prepared to suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.

<-prev | top | next->

42 This was the situation recently with two critically acclaimed London productions, The Pillars of the Community and The Wild Duck.
43 Cf.’Ghosts on Two Continents and Two Cultures at 20th-Century End’ Ibsen News and Comment 19 (1999) 4
44 Wired Magazine, Issue 14.02 - February 2006
45 Ibid.