HENRIK IBSEN
1828-1906
Week 1:
Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler, Almeida Theatre
2005, starring Eve Best
Hedda Gabler, Old Vic
Theatre, 2012, starring
Sheridan Smith
SARAH KANE’S BLASTED:
ROYAL COURT THEATRE
UPSTAIRS, 1995
 “This disgusting feast of filth” Daily Mail
 “a g ratuitous welter of carnage” The Sunday
Telegraph
 “A sordid little travesty of a play”, The
Spectator
“Facing something actual
and true and ugly and
painful” – Harold Pinter
“Blasted changed reality
because it changed the
means we have of
understanding ourselves. It
showed us a new way in
which to see realty.” –
Edward Bond
IBSEN’S OPEN DRAIN
 The London Daily Telegraph called Ghosts (1881) “an open
drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dir ty act done
publicly; a lazar house with all its doors and windows open”.
 Hedda was particularly controversial:
 “Acrawl with the foulest passions of humanity” (Pictorial World,
1891)
 “Things rank and gross in nature alone have a place in the mean and
sordid philosophy of Ibsen” (Saturday Review, 1891)
 “A horrid miscarriage of the imagination, a monster in female form to
whom no parallel can be found in real life” ( Morganbladet, 1891)
 “We are all Hedda!” (A woman in the audience to the actress
Elizabeth Robbins, London premiere, 1891)
 G B Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891
HOW IBSEN CHANGED THEATRE
 Theatre is not entertainment
 Theatre as confrontational. Theatre that addresses the
audience that it attacks.
 Theatre that becomes defended and supported by radicals – G
B Shaw, the Suf fragettes, all of whom saw themselves as
outside patriarchal bourgeois society (the dominant C19th
class).
 Ibsen is one of the first playwrights to become internationally
known through print.
THEORIES OF NATURALISM
 Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species (1859)
 Georg Brandes: Lecture in Copenhagen 1871: ‘For it is not so
much our laws that need changing as it is our whole
conception of society’.
 1872 – Main Currents in 19 th Centur y Literature (six volumes).
 ‘No more dangerous book could fall into the hand of a
pregnant poet… In twenty years, one will not be able to
comprehend how spiritual existence at home was possible
before these lectures’. Ibsen, 1872
 “Every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the
society to which he belongs…To write is to sit in judgement on
oneself” Ibsen, 1880
TRAGEDY OR FARCE?
 Émile Zola, Naturalism in the Theatre, 1881:
 I believe that we must go back to tragedy… one deed unwinds in all
its reality, and moves the characters to passions and feelings, the
exact analysis of which constitutes the sole interest of the play.
 “I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek”
Oscar Wilde on Hedda.
 “The tragedy of a Hedda in real life is not that she commits
suicide but that she continues to live!” G B Shaw.
 Arthur Miller: ‘Tragedy and the Common Man’ 1949
IBSEN’S NOTES
 SHORT RANGE
 Expects great things of life and the joy of life.
 She really wants to live a man’s life wholly. But then she has
misgivings. Her inheritance, what is implanted in her.
 She marries Tesman but she devotes her imagination to Eilert
Lovborg… In reality she does not have the courage to be a part of
anything like that. Then she realises her condition. Caught! Can’t
comprehend it!
 Hedda, who drives him beyond all limits, draws back at the thought
of a scandal.
 Women have no influence on external matters of government.
Therefore they want to have an influence on souls.
IBSEN’S NOTES
 LONG RANGE
 The play shall deal with ‘the impossible’, that is, to aspire to and
strive for something which is against all the conventions, against that
which is acceptable to conscious minds – Hedda’s included.
 The greatest misery in this world is that so many have nothing to do
but pursue happiness without being able to find it.
 They perceive that the times are full of missions worth devoting one’s
life to, but they cannot discover them.
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES?
 I must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for
women’s rights. I am not even quite sure what women’s rights
really are. To me it has been a question of human rights… My
task has been the portrayal of human beings. ( speech to the
Nor wegian Society for Women’s Rights 1898 ).
 What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings,
human emotions, and human desires, upon a groundwork of
certain of the social conditions and moral principles of the
present day. (1890, a letter to his publisher)
BEWARE OF THE VAMPIRE
 Fin-de-siecle atmosphere: In literature it led to the
characterisation of women as passive creatures of emotion
and instinct or as dangerously attractive but ruthless dolls,
whose instinct is to drag men down to their own biological
level. … The attempt of such women to control or usurp male
creativity was emblematized by the Decadents in vampires,
sphinxes, maenads … but a particularly apt image was
discovered in the symbolic castration.
 Brian Parker, Modern Drama, 32 (1989)
THE FEMALE HAMLET
 Eve Best – “nails all the paradoxes of this great role, creating
a woman who is at once sexy yet frigid, reckless yet cowardly,
bored yet excited, powerful yet vulnerable”. Charles Spencer,
The Telegraph, 2005
 "Richard says he always understood Hedda. I was nerveracked by that, because I didn't at all. I kept reading it and
she seemed quite unpindownable. I wrote a list of all the
words you could use to describe her" - here Best frantically
reels of f a list of stark personality contradictions. "I thought:
she's like a will o' the wisp!""She can be simultaneously
forceful and fragile," she says. "That's a very rare
combination. She can turn on a sixpence .” Eve Best,
inter viewed by Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph , 2005
HEDDA GABLER, DIR. THOMAS
OSTERMEIER, SCHAUBÜHNE, 2005
NATURALISM IN ACTING
 The stichomythia of the Greek and French tragedians was
lengthy in comparison with this unceasing display of hissing
conversational fireworks, fragments of sentences without
verbs, clauses that come to nothing, adverbial exclamations
and cryptic interrogatories… This rapid broken utterance will
give an extraordinary sense of reality. - Edmund Gosse,
English translator of Hedda Gabler, 1891.
IBSEN AND FREUD
 Freud is said to have learnt Norweigan purely to read Ibsen’s
work.
 Freud: On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena ,
1893. The interpretation of Dreams, 1900
 “Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces
within ourselves” Ibsen. An archaeologist of the modern
psyche?
 “I’m working on a poem”, he saw Hedda as a poetic drama.
The poetry of the everyday. Not simply a naturalist – there are
poetic and symbolic images.
A DOLL’S HOUSE, 1879
 Act 3:
 TORVALD – You’re talking like a child. You don’t understand, do you?
You don’t understand religion or morality or responsibility or society.
You don’t understand the society you live in.
 NORA – I don’t even really know what society is. I don’t know if
there’s any such thing.
“Ibsen’s greatest achievement was that by means of the
theatre…he made people think” ( Obituar y, The Academy).