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The Wild Duck

The Wild Duck is as mysterious as any of Ibsen's plays. It resembles those paintings, which seem to offer two alternative images of the subject at the same time. One image is the realistic domestic tragedy of the petit bourgeois Ekdal family: it's retreat from reality and the nemesis it suffers from this escapism. The other image seems to raise the huge drama of the Christian story of our human fall and possible Redemption. A Son descends to redeem a fallen humanity suffering from the dominion of his Father. He must combat a Deceiver who lives below, with a 'demonic' companion. Redeemer and Deceiver battle for the fallen Ekdals, one attempting to raise it higher, to the 'Ideal'; the other, to drag it lower into a swamp of self-deception: and the fallen family buckles under the strain. After the catastrophe, the Son and the Deceiver continue to quarrel over whether the truth can set humanity free. Therefore, in the microcosm of the Ekdal family tragi-comedy can be seen, as an emerging supertext, the macrocosm of the huge Christian story of Christ's descent into our world.

This audacious counterpoint of 'everyday' and 'archetypal' realities, which is Ibsen's procedure throughout the Cycle, can be discovered both in the archetypal structure of the play's action and within the texture of the dialogue and scenography of the play. In The Wild Duck, Ibsen invented for the modern theatre one of its major recurring metaphors. In the fantasy attic to which the Ekdals retreat from alienated reality, we can see the matrix of the pipe dreams of Gorky's The Lower Depths or Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh; the escapist medievalism of Pirandello's Henry IV; the illusory world to which Tennessee Williams' vulnerable characters retreat (Laura's glass menagerie being a brittle duplication of that of Hedvig Ekdal); the escapist retreats of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman and of George and Martha's fantasies of parentage in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Ibsen's image of the tragi-comic human condition, in this play, had proved its potency as a theatrical metaphor.