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•The Lady from the Sea•
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The Lady from the Sea

The Lady from the Sea explores the mystery of the immense exterior world. In The Wild Duck the depths of the sea was a mysterious interior world: in the close confines of the Ekdal home was the fantasy attic, with its miniature landscape, its treasures left by 'the Flying Dutchman" and its innermost secrets lodged in the mind of a young girl. That landscape has now expanded, in The Lady from the Sea, into a vast cosmic space: of mountain ranges, of the sea, fjord, sky and stars. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, as if from another planet. He is Hedvig's Flying Dutchman now claiming another sacrifice. He already has been drowned in the "depths of the sea" and now returns to life and to the land in order to claim his faithless wife, Ellida, the heroine of the play. He forces a decision upon her which we are able to observe in this play of the open-air - unlike Hedvig Ekdal's secret and mysterious decision to commit suicide.

After a dialectical action that splits apart the world of the play and threatens to drive the shizophrenic mind of the heroine into madness, Ellida does not go away with the Stranger - which would be a form of suicide, perhaps. She retreats from the abyss - or the leap into the superhuman - that opens before her, and returns to a familiar human world of obligations and rewards. She explains the reason for her decision, makes an open choice, and her decision is acted out before our eyes. The play ends as ambiguous comedy, the sense of immense danger narrowly escaped being mixed with a sense of immense opportunities and vistas forever lost.