Ibsen on Theatre

Frode Helland, Julie Holledge, Frode Helland, Julie Holledge

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781848423121
• eBook ISBN: 9781788500890
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

A unique collection of everything that Ibsen wrote about the theatre.

Three new productions of plays by Henrik Ibsen open somewhere in the world every week. Moreover, they are adapted into multiple genres: Chinese and Western Opera, Japanese Noh theatre, puppet plays, musicals, dance performances, tourist spectacles, promenade performances, applied theatre, community events, and every possible screen technology.

The more successful Ibsen became as a playwright, the more reluctant he was to make public pronouncements about the practice of theatre, but his thoughts on the art form can be gleaned by mining his prefaces, letters, speeches and newspaper articles.

For the first time, these fragments have been gathered together in one volume. Arranged chronologically, they throw a unique light on Ibsen's views on theatre production, casting, translation, the business of theatre, and most importantly his own plays. The result is an invaluable resource for those who seek to know what Ibsen himself thought about his work and about the theatre of his time.

Ibsen on Theatre is edited, introduced and annotated by Frode Helland and Julie Holledge, with new translations by May-Brit Akerholt. Also included is a foreword by Richard Eyre.

Ibsen on Theatre is in the Nick Hern Books...On Theatre series: what the world's greatest dramatists had to say about theatre, in their own words.

'For anyone interested in Ibsen's plays—actors, directors, students, audiences—[this is] a marvellously accessible compendium of the thoughts of a man I now unhesitatingly describe as a very great playwright.' Richard Eyre, from his Foreword

1

Ibsen on Ibsen

Ibsen has proved a popular subject for biographers; he even appears in A.S.Byatt’s novel, The Biographer’s Tale (2000). But he wrote very few autobiographical fragments. We begin with Ibsen’s own brief account of his childhood, written in 1881 and later revised in 1887 for inclusion in the Henrik Jæger biography published in 1888. It deals with Ibsen’s early life prior to his father’s bankruptcy, which resulted in the family moving from Skien, an important southern coastal town, to a farmhouse in the surrounding countryside. The bankruptcy transformed the young Henrik’s life, and at the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a small town south of Skien. The preface to the second edition of his first play Catiline provides a glimpse of Ibsen’s life in Grimstad and his first efforts as a poet and playwright. He depicts himself as a young man living on the periphery of major European upheavals caused by the wave of revolutions in 1848. Norway and Sweden were largely unaffected, but Denmark was embroiled in war with the German states over the sovereignty of Schleswig. With some irony, Ibsen describes the militancy of his youth as expressed in poems demanding that the Swedish King support Denmark, and in praise of the Magyars, who were struggling for Hungarian independence from the Habsburg Empire.

These autobiographical extracts, written for publication when Ibsen was in his fifties, contain the reflections of a successful writer hinting at themes and metaphors that occur in his later writings. There are no equivalent reflections from Ibsen about his adult life and the only glimpses we have of his practice as an established writer come from his contemporaries. Their descriptions echo the image of the respectable bourgeois immortalised in his photographic portraits. They also reflect his daily routine in Gossensass, as described to his wife Suzannah (who was on holiday in Norway) in a letter dated 4 July 1884:

So far I have risen at six thirty, had my breakfast sent up half an hour later, and after that gone out while the room is being serviced, then been writing from nine to one. Then eaten dinner with a ravenous appetite. I have also been able to write something, or do some underlining in the print manuscript of The Wild Duck, in the afternoon. The second act will be finished in five to six days. I do not drink beer; and thus I feel very well. Instead, I drink milk and some white wine, but not much, with water added; supper at seven thirty. So far, I have been in my bed before ten o’clock and slept well.

Yet the image of the abstemious artist is only part of the Ibsen story: it belies the numerous anecdotes about his erratic and sometimes drunken behaviour while living in Italy between 1864 and 1868. As these anecdotes have no reference to Ibsen’s views on theatre, they are not included in this collection, but can be found in the biographies by Michael Meyer and Robert Ferguson.

From Ibsen’s ‘Childhood Memories’

When the streets of my native town of Skien were named—or perhaps only re-named—some years ago, I enjoyed the honour of having a street named after me. At least, so I learnt from the newspapers, and I have heard it since then from reliable travellers. By their description, this street leads from the town square down to the harbour.

But if this information is correct, I do not understand why the street has come to bear my name, for I was neither born there, nor did I ever live there.

On the contrary, I was born in a house on the town square; Stockmann’s Building, as it was then called. It stood exactly opposite the front of the church, with its high flight of steps and conspicuous tower. To the right of the church stood the town pillory, and to the left the town hall, with the prison and the lock-up for the insane. The fourth side of the town square was occupied by the Latin school and the common school. The church stood apart in the middle.

This vista, then, was the first image of the world that presented itself to my eyes. All architecture—nothing green, no open country landscape. But the air in this quadrangle of stone and wood was filled all day with the distant roar of two cascading waterfalls, the Langefos and the Klosterfos, and of the many other waters; and from dawn to dusk, above the constant rumble of all these cataracts, came something that sounded like sharp, sometimes piercing, sometimes moaning, women’s screams. This was the sound of hundreds of saw blades at work out by the falls. Later on, when I read about the guillotine, I could not help thinking of these blades. The church was naturally the grandest building in town. When Skien was burnt down one Christmas Eve towards the end of the last century, owing to the carelessness of a maidservant, the old church was destroyed as well. The girl was, reasonably enough, executed. But the town, which was rebuilt with straight wide streets down the hollows and up the slopes to which they clung, gained a new church in the process. The inhabitants claimed with a certain pride that it was built of yellow Dutch brick, designed by an architect from Copenhagen, and that it was exactly like the church at Kongsberg. I did not appreciate this distinction at the time, but what powerfully attracted my attention was a huge, burly white angel, which, on weekdays, floated in the air under the arched roof with a bowl in its hand, but on Sundays, when a child was to be christened, softly descended earthwards.

Even more perhaps than the white angel in the church, the black poodle residing in the upper tower engaged my fancy. At night, the watchman used to proclaim the hour from this tower. The poodle had fiery red eyes, but he was rarely visible. Indeed, as far as I know, he only ever appeared once. It was one New Year’s morning, at the very moment when the watchman shouted ‘One’ through the tower window. The black poodle came up the turret-stair behind him, stood still, and looked at him with his fiery eyes, nothing more; but the watchman leapt head first out of the tower window down into the town square, where the devout, who had gone to usher in the New Year’s morning by listening to a sermon, saw him lying dead. From that night, the watchman never calls ‘One’ from the tower window in Skien’s church.

This incident of the watchman and the poodle happened long before my time, and I have since heard of similar events supposed to have taken place in several other Norwegian churches in the old days. But that particular tower window was significant to me while I was still a child, because it was from there I received the first conscious and permanent impression on my mind. My nurse carried me up the tower one day and allowed me to sit in the open window, holding me firmly from behind, of course, with her faithful arms. I recollect perfectly how amazed I was to look down on the tops of the hats of the people below. I looked into our own rooms, seeing the window-frames and curtains, and my mother standing at one of the windows; indeed, I could see over the roof into the yard, where our brown horse stood hitched up to the stable-door, whisking his tail. A bright tin pail was hanging against the door. Then suddenly there was a great hustle and bustle and signalling from our house, and the nurse hastily snatched me in and hurried down with me. I remember nothing more; but I was often told afterwards that my mother had caught sight of me up in the tower window, and with a loud shriek had fainted away, as people used to do in those days; and that when I was presently returned to her, she cried, and kissed and fondled me. As a boy, I never went across the market-square without looking up at the tower window. I always felt as though that window and the church-poodle were some special concern of mine.

[…]

We did not live for long in the house on the town square. My father bought a larger house, into which we moved when I was about four years old. This new home was a corner house, a little higher up the town, at the foot of the Hundervad Hill, so named after an old doctor who spoke German; his dignified wife used to drive in a ‘glass coach’, which in winter was transformed into a sleigh. There were many large rooms in our house, lower and upper rooms, and here my parents led a busy social life. But we boys did not spend a lot of time indoors. The market-square, where the two biggest schools were, was the natural meeting-place and battlefield for all the lads of the town. The Latin school was then under the direction of Rector Örn, a very distinguished and amiable old man; the headmaster of the common school was probably Iver Flasrud, the beadle, a fine old man too, who was at the same time in great demand as barber. The boys from these two schools fought many a fierce battle under the walls of the church; but I, belonging to neither, was generally a looker-on. Besides, I was not eager to fight in my childhood.

[…]

Skien, in my young days, was an exceedingly lively and sociable town, quite unlike what it subsequently became. Several highly cultivated and wealthy families of consequence lived in the town itself, or on their estates in the neighbourhood. Most of these families were more or less closely related, and dances, dinners, and music-parties followed each other in almost unbroken succession in both winter and summer. Many travellers also passed through the town, and as there were as yet no real hotels, they lodged with friends or relatives. We almost always had guests in our large roomy house, especially at Christmas and Fair time, when the house was full and we kept an open table from morning till night. The Fair at Skien was held in February, and it was a very happy time for us boys; we began to save up our money six months beforehand, to be able to see the jugglers, and rope-dancers, and horse-riders, and to buy ginger-bread down in the booths. Whether this Fair was an important one from a commercial point of view I do not know; it survives in my memory only as a great, popular holiday that lasted for about a week.

The 17th of May was not kept with any special festivities at Skien at that time.¹ […] But St. John’s Eve [Midsummer’s Eve] made up for it. There were no public observances, but the boys and young men assembled in five or six or more parties, each with the task of collecting fuel for its own bonfire. So as early as Whitsuntide we would begin to haunt the shipyards and stores to beg tar-barrels. This peculiar custom had existed from time immemorial. Anything we could not get by fair means we stole, without either the owner or the police ever thinking of proceeding against the crime. Thus, by degrees, each group collected a whole heap of empty tar-barrels. We enjoyed the same customary right over old stranded boathulks. If we were lucky enough to succeed in dragging one away and hiding our booty, we won the right of possession, or at any rate no one disputed it. Then on St. John’s Eve the hulk was carried in triumph through the streets to the place where our bonfire was stacked. A fiddler was perched in it. I have often seen such a procession, and once took part in one. (HIS, vol. 16, 496–501.)

21 September 1882 to Georg Brandes
(Danish critic and author.)

My father was a merchant with varied and extensive business activities, who affected a reckless hospitality in his home. He faced bankruptcy in 1836, and all that was left to us was a property close to the town. We moved there, and that was how we lost touch with the circles we used to belong to.

Preface to the Second Edition (1875) of Catiline

The drama Catiline, with which I entered upon my literary career, was written during the winter of 1848–49, that is, in my twenty-first year.

At the time, I was in Grimstad under the necessity of earning with my own hands the wherewithal for daily life and the means for instruction, preparatory to my taking the entrance examinations to university. The age was one of great anxiety and perturbation. The February revolution, the uprisings in Hungary and elsewhere, the Schleswig war—all this had a great effect upon and hastened my development, however immature it may have remained for quite some time afterwards. I wrote resounding poems of encouragement to the Magyars, urging them to hold out for the sake of liberty and humanity in their righteous struggle against the ‘tyrants’; I wrote a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, including in particular, as far as I can remember, an appeal to set aside all petty considerations and to march forthwith at the head of his army to the aid of our brothers on the outermost borders of Schleswig. In as much as I now doubt, contrary to those times, that my winged appeals would have helped the cause of the Magyars or the Scandinavians to any significant degree, I consider it fortunate that they remained within the more private sphere of the manuscript. However, on more agitated occasions I could not keep from expressing myself in the impassioned spirit of my poetic effusions, which meanwhile brought me nothing but a questionable reward—from friends or non-friends; the former greeted me as peculiarly gifted for the unintentionally droll, and the latter thought it in the highest degree strange that a young person in my subordinate position could undertake to enquire into affairs concerning matters about which not even they themselves dared to entertain an opinion. I must be truthful and add that my conduct at various times did not justify any great hope that society might have had of an increase in my sense of civic virtue, in as much as, with epigrams and caricatures, I also fell out with many who deserved better from me, and whose friendship in reality I prized. Altogether, while a great struggle raged in the outside world, I found myself on a war footing with the small society in which I lived, cramped by the conditions and circumstances of life.

[…]

My drama [Catiline] was written during the hours of the night. I practically had to steal the spare time for my study from my employer, a good and respectable man, occupied heart and soul, however, with his business; and from those stolen hours of study I had to steal further moments to write my verses. Thus I had only the night to resort to. I believe this is the unconscious reason that almost the entire action of the piece takes place at night. Naturally, something as incompatible with my surroundings as the fact that I was busying myself with the writing of plays had to be kept secret; but a twenty-year-old poet can hardly continue like this without anybody being privy to it, and therefore I confided in two friends of my own age about what I was secretly engaged in.

The three of us pinned great expectations on Catiline once it had been completed. First and foremost it was now to be copied for submission under an assumed name to the theatre in Christiania, and furthermore it was to be published, of course. One of my faithful and trusting friends undertook to prepare a handsome and legible copy of my uncorrected draft, a task which he performed with such a degree of conscientiousness that he did not omit even a single one of the innumerable dashes which, in the heat of composition, I had liberally interspersed throughout, wherever the exact phrase did not occur to me at the moment. The second of my friends, Ole C. Schulerud, who was at that time a student and later a lawyer, and whose name I here mention since he is no longer among the living, went to Christiania with the transcript. I still remember one of his letters in which he informed me that Catiline had now been submitted to the theatre; that it would soon be given a performance—about that there could naturally be no doubt, as the management consisted of very discriminating men; and that there could be as little doubt that the booksellers of the town would, one and all, gladly pay a handsome fee for the first edition, the main point being, he thought, to discover the shop that would offer the highest bid.

After a long and tense period of waiting, a few difficulties began to appear. The management returned the piece to my friend with a polite but equally decisive rejection. He now touted the manuscript from one bookseller to another; to a man, they expressed themselves in terms similar to those of the theatrical management. The highest bidder demanded such and such to publish the piece without any fee to me.

All this, however, was far from lessening my friend’s belief in victory. He wrote to the contrary, that it was probably for the best; I should become the publisher of my drama myself; he would advance me the necessary funds; we should divide the profits, keeping in mind that he would undertake the business end of the deal, except for the proof-reading, which he regarded as superfluous in view of the handsome and legible manuscript the printers had to follow. In a later letter he declared that, considering these promising prospects, he contemplated abandoning his own studies in order to devote himself completely to the publishing of my works; he thought I should easily be able to write two or three plays a year, and according to a calculation of probabilities he had made, our surplus would enable us in a not too distant future to undertake the journey through Europe and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Richard Eyre
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ibsen on Ibsen
• 2. Early Plays
• 3. Closet Dramas
• 4. Middle Plays
• 5. Late Plays
• 6. Copyright and Translation
• 7. Ibsen and the Christiania Theater
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright Information