David Edgar’s plays include The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Playing with Fire and, most recently, Testing the Echo. He is working on a book about playwriting.
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RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Literature and literary criticism, Drama, 1800-1899, 1860-1879, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1900-1909, Ibsen, Henrik, Europe, Northern Europe, Norway
Vol. 19 No. 6 · 20 March 1997
pages 10-11 | 3572 words
Which is the hero?
David Edgar
- Henrik Ibsen by Robert Ferguson
Cohen, 466 pp, £25.00, November 1996, ISBN 1 86066 078 9
There is little about the charming Hotel Tramontano in Sorrento to indicate quite what inspired Henrik Ibsen to write a play about congenital syphilis while staying there, and not much more (I am assured) in the equally delightful Hotel Luna at Amalfi to evoke the dark midwinter drama of A Doll’s House. The incongruity between the stark Scandinavian gloom of the major plays and the Mediterranean lushness of the places where Ibsen wrote them is a warning against reading the art too readily from the life, and one that Robert Ferguson has not heeded. For him, the life is the only way to support his thesis, which is that the great plays aren’t great at all, and that after Ibsen’s first success, Peer Gynt (written at Casamicciola, Ischia, in 1867), it all went horribly wrong.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 8 · 24 April 1997
From Robert Ferguson
While I cannot deny that I admire Ibsen’s early masterpieces Brand and Peer Gynt more than the later prose plays, I believe a misquotation in David Edgar’s review of my biography (LRB, 20 March) creates a wrong impression of why I do so. In the Foreword I describe Peer Gynt as a ‘cosmic circus’, not a ‘comic circus’. I used the word to convey the idea that in Peer Gynt Ibsen was trying to write a play about ‘everything’, whereas in The Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House the aims are much more circumscribed.
Challenging my description of When We Dead Awaken as Ibsen’s moving last attempt to understand himself as a man and an artist, and presumably thinking of the reference to a ‘comic circus’, David Edgar writes that there is no evidence that Ibsen had greater respect for his early ‘funny plays’ than for the later, more famous plays with modern settings. But the plays that I suggest Ibsen was thinking of when he has Rubek talk about the dramatic changes that took place in his sculpture – the popularisation and vulgarisation of his work – are The Pretenders, Love’s Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, the plays of the 1860s and early 1870s that pre-date The Pillars of Society. With the exception of Love’s Comedy, none of these can be described as ‘funny’ plays.
One of the chief points of distinction between these and the well-known later plays is the presence of a range of complex and fascinating male characters – Falk, Skule, Brand and Peer Gynt, Julian the Apostate – while female characters play only minor roles. The situation in the plays from The Pillars of Society in 1877 to Hedda Gabler in 1890 is, generally speaking, the reverse, and it seems to me that Ibsen’s deepening interest in the psychology of his female characters led him to create alongside them male characters who cannot compare in complexity and interest with the earlier creations. The situation persists until Ibsen’s interest again returns to a study of male psychology in The Master Builder and in John Gabriel Borkmann. Our Ibsen critics persist, with Shaw, in wanting to find in him a dedicated social reformer and a consistently liberal thinker, and edit away what does not fit in with this picture.
David Edgar thinks my way of describing Nora’s behaviour in deserting her family at the end of the play displays a ‘glum, accusatory morality’. I would submit that the glum, accusatory morality is Nora’s. Thorvald is, by the end of A Doll’s House, utterly humbled. His attitudes have changed as dramatically as have Nora’s, and it is inconceivable that the relationship between them could ever return to its former dishonesty. So why does she leave? Because Thorvald must be punished. The absence of a sense of forgiveness is typical of Ibsen. That her leaving might be a dramatic necessity is another argument altogether.
Robert Ferguson
Oslo
