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Ibsen Volume III: Four Plays |
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The
Lady from the Sea Little Eyolf John Gabriel Borkman When We Dead Awaken |
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Available for purchase through: When We Dead Awaken Ibsen
called this the 'Epilogue' to the Cycle
and it is a play filled with the memory of the earlier plays and of
the haunted European spirit. Set in summer, and ending "at dawn,
before the sunrise" it concludes both the whole Cycle and the final
series of four plays, beginning with The Master Builder, that
have brought us through a long night of the world soul. Its opening
mage of humanity convalescing at a sanatorium, supervised by a bland
and controlling 'Spa Manager', anticipates The Magic Mountain
of Thomas Mann (who wrote an admiring account of the play) and of T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land. The physical action of the play is as
simple and as resonant as that of Sophokles' Oedipus at Kolonos.
An elderly artist and his young wife arrive at a sanatorium. The artist
meets a former model whom he once loved and abandoned. The wife meets
a 'bear hunter' to whom she is immensely but fearfully attracted. As
in some extraordinary, adulterous minuet the foursome divide into two
new couples. The scene of the play gradually ascends, act by act, finally
to a deadly, storm-ridden mountain height. One couple descends to live;
the other ascends to die. |
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