Staging Death

Martin Puchner

Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy by Toril Moi
Oxford, 396 pp, £25.00, August 2006, ISBN 0 19 929587 5

Henrik Ibsen died in 1906, acknowledged as the founder of modern drama. Today, he is the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. It was an unlikely success story. Born in 1828 in an isolated town in Norway, when the country was still dependent on its long-time coloniser Denmark, Ibsen grew up speaking a language known by few and lacking any great dramatic tradition. In order to write himself out of this obscurity, he had to become European, and modern.

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Vol. 29 No. 3 · 8 February 2007 » Martin Puchner » Staging Death (print version)
Pages 21-22 | 2349 words

Letters

From Tim Allen

Watching a rerun of The Apartment just after reading Martin Puchner’s piece on Ibsen, I was struck by the parallels between Billy Wilder’s film and A Doll’s House (LRB, 8 February). Both dramas feature a living space and take place over the Christmas period; both are concerned with the hypocrisy of supposedly respectable marriage in a bourgeois world; and both present suicide as an ill-advised way out of a cosily miserable existence. Ibsen is subverting the tradition of 19th-century melodrama; Wilder is doing the same for Hollywood romantic comedy.

Ibsen presents women who appear to be simply wives, mothers, nannies, but turn out to be wage-earners making difficult choices to keep their families off the breadline. Wilder presents the opposite: women who have jobs but whose real power lies in their sexual attractiveness to men with better jobs. Wilder’s insurance company, Consolidated Life, is an unremittingly sexist world: all its executives are male; all its women are either secretaries, switchboard operators or – if they can’t spell – lift operators. Torvald’s bank in A Doll’s House seems positively progressive by comparison: the plot hinges on the same job being sought by a man and a woman; the woman gets it, and the two of them fall implausibly in love. That scenario is almost commonplace in more recent Hollywood comedies, but it would be unthinkable in the world of The Apartment.

Tim Allen
Liverpool