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Play It Again: Re-enacted Story as Tragic Plot
by Brian Johnston

III. The Plot-Story Ratio in Ibsen

In Ibsen's plays the stories present a record of arbitrary, open actions exhibiting rich variety of detail. Reconfigured as tight retrospective plots these arbitrary events reveal the closed structures of necessity, design, even nemesis. This engagement of the plot upon the material of the story is the essence of Ibsen's dramaturgy. The non-naturalistic devices of an Ibsen plot: - accelerated consequences, compression, ironic patterning, abrupt confrontations - subject the story material to an insistent aesthetic structuring. The major events staged by the plays are less external actions newly occurring, as in Shakespeare or Brecht, than earlier events tragically recalled and re-enacted in the mind within the condensed time of the performance. Jennette Lee, in 1907, discussing The Lady from the Sea, noted how, in Ibsen's plots, like those of the Greek dramatists, and unlike Shakespeare's, characters are made to recollect actions from the past which take on the vivid visual presence of immediate experience:

"one source of interest is the gradual unfolding of the precedent plot. It is a series of pictures each picture suggesting some phase of early action in its setting. Compare this method with that of the Shakespearean play in which the early lines narrate what slight precedent action is given. In Ibsen's play we see the Lighthouse, the Betrothal, the Sea, the Stranger killing the Captain, wandering over the face of the waters, entering foreign ports, in the cabin of the ship reading the Norwegian paper, that tells of the marriage of his betrothed. All these are not merely events narrated. They are scenes..."

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