CHRIS THURMAN: Artists take malleable play texts and make them revelatory
Henrik Ibsen’s characters reject broken marriages and stifling social conventions
Henrik Ibsen is widely regarded as the first “modern” playwright. His experimentation with form and style — ranging from grim realism to surreal fantasia and psychological melodrama — was matched by his boldness in treating subject matter that was widely considered taboo. Ibsen’s characters reject broken marriages and stifling social conventions, seeking to free themselves from the constraints of bourgeois propriety.
While the patrician class of Norway in the 19th century is rigorously critiqued by Ibsen, the plays themselves rarely escape this late-industrial context. Translations into English can seem a little stiff and Victorian. As with Shakespeare (the only playwright staged more often than Ibsen), there are plenty of productions each year that aim for “fidelity” in rendering an “authentic” setting, plot and characterisation...
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