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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: John Gabriel Borkman This
is the most strangely 'Gothic' of Ibsen's realist plays while also one
of his most 'classic' in structure. It is set in winter, in the north,
where the vital passions of the characters are locked in a lethal coldness
of the soul. The critic, Jan Kott, called it Ibsen's greatest play and
compared it to Shakespeare's King Lear probably for the emotional
extremities to which it drives its larger-than-life characters. It dramatizes
a world of the living dead, that of the Borkman family, in which life
impulses have been so vehemently and long repressed, that the elder
trio in the play, Borkman, Gunnhild and Ella, actually have created
norms out of the condition of insanity; living at a level of manic resentment
which keeps a husband and wife, who inhabit the same house, unable to
speak to each other for over eight years; and two sisters, locked in
fierce mutual hatred, willing to fight to the death to possess the son
of the man they both loved but who destroyed them both. |
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 In
a desperate bid to prolong their deadly drama into the future, these ghostly
elders seek to entrap the younger generation, young Erhart Borkman, and
to continue to live through him to prolong their spiritually deadly condition.
But Erhart is rescued by the divorcée, Mrs. Wilton, who awakens
Erhart to sexual passion and emotional liberation. Between them, they
affirm life impulses that fight back and ultimately break free of the
entrapment of the elders as if escaping a house of horrors. As George
Bernard Shaw wrote of the play: "This melancholy household of the
dead crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation at the door....
The fresh air and the light break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble
into dust." |
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