Word: hialmar
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DOCTOR GLAS by Hialmar SÖderberg. 150 pages. Little, Brown...
...Wild Duck, the archrealist Ibsen conceded-long before O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh-that men need illusions to survive. The Ekdal family are happy so long as Hialmar Ekdal is ignorant of his wife's past and the true paternity of his child. Ibsen's exposure of Gregers Werle, the meddling idealist who enlightens Hialmar in the name of truth, is merciless. But his portrayal of flabby, feckless, self-excusing Hialmar is hardly less...
Today, Ibsen-dotting every i, megaphoning every idea-seems most merciless toward his audience. And the current production is not only didactic, but thoroughly inept. Maurice Evans, for example, portrays Hialmar so broadly that he might be playing Micawber, so stagily that he might be spouting blank verse...
...about a man who was the enemy of most people because he told the truth, even when truth-telling was tantamount to telling tales. Gregers Werle, the son of a rich Norwegian mine-owner, suspected that his libertine father had disposed of an old mistress by marrying her to Hialmar Ekdal, the son of a man whom the libertine had ruined. Gregers Werle tattles to Hialmar Ekdal, who is much too little a fool to disbelieve him. Knowing that his adolescent daughter is really the child of another man, he snubs her love for him, wherefore she kills herself...
...deeply tragic play, The Wild Duck is revived beautifully by the Actors' Theatre (which produced it five years ago), with Blanche Yurka as the placid wife of Hialmar Edkal and Dallas Anderson as her husband. Ralph Roeder is Gregers Werle who drops the final curtain by announcing that his true mission in life is ". . . to be thirteenth at table...
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