ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEATRE AND

PERFORMANCE
Henrik Ibsen
Michael M. Chemers
University of California, Santa Cruz

INTRODUCTION
When Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in Anti-Goeze (1778) that the
theatre could be as, if not more, effective than the church pulpit as a
platform for the education of spectators in Enlightenment values and
to become more ethical, more compassionate human beings, he
inspired generations of European and American playwrights to think of
the stage as a laboratory for profound experiments in the human moral
and intellectual condition. The genre of social realism in the theatre is
one of the most widespread, long-lasting influential traditions inspired
by this notion, and Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is arguably the first, and
greatest, of the social-realist playwrights. Today, his plays are
performed all over the world, second only in frequency to those of
William Shakespeare. His direct influence on the plays of the most
celebrated playwrights who came after him cannot be overestimated.




HISTORY
Henrik Ibsen was born into a solidly middle-class family in the town of
Skein, a port city in the Telemark region of southern Norway. His
forebears on both sides had been successful in trade and shipping and
his family was prosperous and respected. His father and mother were
fairly close blood relatives before they married, which raised the spectre
of incest in the household. His mother was by all accounts a selfless
woman who would, in accordance with the value systems of middle-class
society, sacrifice her own needs in favour of her family’s. But when Ibsen
was seven years old his father suffered financial ruin, and the family was
forced to move out of their comfortable townhouse. At 15, due to lack of
money, Ibsen had to leave school to work as a pharmacist, but he wrote
plays in his free time. At 18, Ibsen fathered a child out of wedlock; this son
was raised by his mother’s family, and Ibsen would never meet him. He
moved to Oslo (then Christiania) to enter the university there, but was
unable to pass the entrance exams. It was there, in 1850, that he
completed his first published play, Cataline, and afterwards moved to
Bergen on the west coast of Norway to work at the Norwegian Theatre.
He was more successful as a director and producer of plays than as a
writer of them until 1856, when his play The Feast at Solhaug premiered
under his direction. This play, a cloak-and-dagger romance inspired by
Viking sagas, was popular for its poetic style, and Ibsen gained some
measure of local fame. He was invited to a celebrated literary salon
hosted by author and poet Magdalene Thoresen, where he met
Thoresen’s stepdaughter, Suzannah; she would become his wife in 1858.
They would have a single child, Sigurd, in 1859.

Based on his successes in Bergen, Ibsen was invited to return to the east
coast to head the Christiania Theatre in 1858. Money was in short supply
and success in the more cosmopolitan city proved elusive. Ibsen became
disgusted with Norway and in 1864 moved to Sorrento, Italy. It was there,
on the shores of the sun-drenched Bay of Naples, that Ibsen wrote his
most celebrated plays about life in a dark, cold, dreary, and socially
stultifying vision of Norway. His first major success came in 1865 with
Brand, a powerful meditation on the terrible price that must be paid to live
a truly moral life (this play included the character Agnes who, like Ibsen’s
mother, is prepared to sacrifice herself for her husband). Critics, moved
by its intellectual content, hailed Brand as a modern masterpiece. Ibsen’s

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next major success was in 1867 with Peer Gynt, a modernisation of the
“Ash Lad” or “Per Gynt” Norwegian folktales.

Ibsen’s fame sky-rocketed. In 1868, he relocated to Dresden, Germany,

and devoted himself to a single play that would not be finished until 1873.
Ibsen thought of this play, Emperor and Galilean, as his most important
work, but it remains much less popular than some of his other plays. In
1875, Ibsen moved to Munich where he began work on the body of
realistic plays that would cement his influence: Pillars of Society (1877), a
story about a respectable merchant in a Norwegian port city whose life is
suddenly disrupted by his scandalous secret past; A Doll’s House (1879),
the controversial story of a woman who will sacrifice anything for her
husband except her own honour and dignity; Ghosts (1881), the even
more controversial story – thanks to its frank discussion of syphilis – of a
woman who stays with her unfaithful husband against her better
judgment on the advice of her pastor; and Enemy of the People (1882),
about a conscientious doctor who defies his selfish and ignorant
community at great cost to himself.

Ibsen’s reputation as a great intellectual, a masterful poet, and an

unforgiving social critic was established throughout Europe by the early
1880s. His rival August Strindberg (1849-1912) referred to him in an 1884
letter to playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson as “the angriest man in Europe.”
Ibsen continued to produce challenging social-realist dramas that defied
conventional morality and compelled audiences to psychological
introspection. Many of these, notably Hedda Gabler (1890) provided
strong roles for female actors and much material for discussion among
both proponents and critics of the rising feminist movement. The
modernist, realist, dialectical style Ibsen developed in this period proved
profoundly influential to generations of playwrights.

Ibsen returned to Oslo in 1891, where he lived a rigorously disciplined life.

Wealthy and respected, he would write four more critically acclaimed
plays before his career as a writer came to an abrupt halt in 1900 when
he suffered multiple strokes. He never fully recovered, but he remained
witty and irascible until his death on 23 May 1906. Over the last century,
Ibsen’s memory and impact have been honoured with annual festivals –
including a famous one in Dehli, India – with museums, statues and parks,
including a sidewalk in Oslo, inlaid with lines from his most popular plays,

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that traces Ibsen’s daily walk from his home to his favourite café. An
asteroid was named after Ibsen in 1995 and the 100th anniversary of his
death (2006) was declared ‘Ibsen Year’ in Norway. The International
Ibsen Award is held every two years on Ibsen’s birthday. Recipients
include Peter Brook, Arianne Mnouchkine, Heiner Goebbels, and, most
recently, Forced Entertainment.

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AIMS
The notion of a permanent, dedicated Norwegian theatre was still fairly
new when Ibsen was born. Previously, Norwegians enjoyed theatre only
when travelling performance troupes – often Swedish or Danish – would
temporarily set up shop in handy buildings. When the Christiana Theatre
was established in 1836 in what is now Oslo, it employed Danish theatre
artists who performed, in Danish, plays by Danish authors – primarily due
to the lack of artistic talent among Norwegians, or so the director claimed.
But national tensions between Denmark and Norway had existed for
centuries. Many Norwegians saw the Danes as haughty, aristocratic and
imperialist, and the citizens of Christiania did not take kindly to what they
saw as Danish cultural dominance in the performing arts. Even Danish
theatre, some critics felt, relied too heavily on the models of bourgeois
comedy and drama coming out of France. A call went out for native
Norwegian dramatists to create uniquely, culturally specific Norwegian
drama, but progress was mixed. The earliest notable writer to answer this
call was probably Henrik Wergeland (1808-1845) whose works were
intellectually rich, politically astute, and insisted on Enlightenment values.
Yet even he wrote primarily in Danish (with some Norwegian vocabulary),
and his controversial but promising career was cut short when he died of
lung disease in 1844. A Norwegian-speaking theatre opened to compete
with the Christiania Theatre in 1852, but it went out of business a decade
later. Ibsen, who also wrote his early plays in Danish, was brought from
Bergen to head the Christiania Theatre in 1858 as part of a promise to
utilise more Norwegian talent, but under his direction the theatre went
bankrupt in 1862 and, disgusted and discouraged, Ibsen began his self-
imposed exile to Italy shortly thereafter.

Norwegian would not be solidly established as the language of the

theatre in Norway until 1872. Initially, Ibsen’s goal had been to write
significant, meaningful and specifically Norwegian dramas that would be
popular and help to establish a native playwriting tradition. Emboldened
and empowered by his success, he dedicated himself to creating an
intellectually rich body of drama that addressed, in true Hegelian
dialectical style, what he felt was the most pressing problem facing his
community: the unhealthy adherence to a psychologically damaging set
of bourgeois social values that were ostensibly highly moral but in
actuality encouraged cruelty, hypocrisy, shame and self-loathing,

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especially among individuals equipped to resist such values. This made
him controversial, but the controversy itself impelled even further
dialectical engagement with his work between his critics and defenders,
which only increased his fame and influence. Before he was finished, his
work would set the standard against which a century of his followers, not
only in Norway but all over the world, would compare themselves, and his
total impact on the development of theatre art has yet to be fully
measured.

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METHODS
In terms of technique, Ibsen was polymorphous. Like those of his
Swedish rival August Strindberg, Ibsen’s plays employed a wide variety of
performance strategies including melodrama, romances inspired by
Viking sagas, and even fantasy. Peer Gynt (1867) is an example of Ibsen’s
work that actually combines multiple methods, some of them seemingly
contradictory.

Based on the “Ash Lad” (or “Per Gynt”) fairy tales collected in 1845 by the
folklorist Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–1885), the play tells a story of
the titular quasi-mythical Norwegian folk hero. In the original tales, the
clever Ash Lad lives in a remote part of Norway where the boundaries
between our mundane, rational world and the fantastic world of the
huldrefolk (trolls and other supernatural beings) are murky and
permeable. As a play, Peer Gynt mixes monsters, mythical heroic
journeys to fantastic locales, and warps in time and space with scenes
that are much more realistic, satirical, and psychologically complex.
Peer’s misguided quest to discover his own true authentic self is a
journey of resistance to a horrifying conformity, but his individuality
ultimately warps him into becoming as selfish and narrow-minded as the
monstrous trolls he meets on his journey. It might seem incongruous that
the “father of modern realism” created, in one of his most famous plays,
this strange mélange of the mundane and the mythic, but the themes
explored in Peer Gynt, of the struggle for authentic being in a conformist
society, are present throughout Ibsen’s oeuvre.

By contrast, the 12 plays Ibsen wrote between 1877 and 1899 (Pillars of
Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck,
Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder,
Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken), known
sometimes as ‘The Ibsen Cycle’, amount to a major intellectual
engagement with Hegelian dialectical philosophy through the precepts of
theatrical naturalism, an aesthetic movement articulated in 1880 by the
French novelist Émile Zola. In the theatre, naturalism adheres to three
principles: first, the plays must feature realistic characters – that is,
psychologically complex characters – facing realistic challenges such as
real humans might encounter in their own lives, in order to be relatable.
Secondly, the plays must deal with meaningful, important themes of the

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day, themes that have significant consequences for the characters and
therefore, by proxy, the audience who relate to them. Finally, the plots of
these plays must be clear and simple, without lots of side-stories and
subplots to be resolved.

These plays therefore eschew flights of fancy, heightened theatricality

and heroic language in favour of an authentic-seeming rhetoric and
setting, and focus on middle-class characters as exemplars of the
community that will be watching the play rather than the exceptional
people such as the kings and heroes that dominated playwriting in
previous ages. Acting and directing styles, to reflect these goals, focused
on nuance and authenticity over grandeur and wonder. Ibsen’s plays
demonstrated how naturalism merges very well with other influential
trends of dialectical thinking in politics (Marxism), understanding of the
self (psychology), and science (Darwinism). Ibsen’s success with this
method was so influential that within a generation, naturalism had
become mainstream and would dominate playwriting for decades to
come. Criticised at various times for its narrowness, lack of theatricality,
and its tight focus on individual psychology at the expense, sometimes, of
larger social or political concerns, Ibsenite naturalism nevertheless
provided a foundation for important plays in the 20th century such as
Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904), Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning
Becomes Electra (1931), and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947), although many of these plays also rely on non-naturalistic
elements.

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FURTHER READING
Ferguson, R. (2001). Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography. London: Faber and
Faber.

Goldman, E. (1914). The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Boston:

Gorham.

Innes, C. (2000). A Sourcebook on Naturalistic Theatre. London:

Routledge.

Internationalibsenaward.com. (2017). Ibsen Awards. [online] Available at:

http://www.internationalibsenaward.com/ [Accessed 25 September 2017].

Johnston, B. (1990) Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama. Pennsylvania:

Pennsylvania State University Press.

Johnston, B. (1992) The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of Plays from Pillars of
Society to When We Dead Awaken. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press.

Meyer, M. (1974) Ibsen. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Moi, T. (2006) Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre,
Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinkney, T. (1989) The Politics of Modernism: Against the New

Conformists. London: Verso.

Shaw, G. (1891) The Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott.

Williams, R. (1993) Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Hogarth Press.