Word: ibsenism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like Exiles, the great play which his young reviewer would later create, Ibsen's last work is a story of homelessness. The aging sculptor Arnold Rubek has returned with his young wife Maja to a coastal resort in his "homeland." But Rubek's life and work have subsided into boredom and mediocrity. His master-piece, a representation of the idea of resurrection in the form of a beautiful young woman, is finished, and its model, the only woman he could ever have loved, has left him. His new wife, his new house, and all the belated rewards which bourgeois society...
...life is the enemy of art, then death must be its comrade. In the last acts Ibsen moves his characters to a health resort in the mountains--a look forward to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain where on a peak high above the "real" world, Rubek and Irene are swept away in the mist and snow of a sudden storm. From below, in the bourgeois flatland, resounds the simple voice of Maja in a childish freedom song which is both mocking...
...character of Rubek is simply too archetypal, too close to Ibsen himself, to be acted fully. Michael Brewer approaches the role with a partially appropriate tone which is at once bored, petulant and bitter, but too often seems to slide into a monotone which is more the actor's than the role's. Rubek's wife Maja (Karen Ross) comes on like a little girl who wants to play house, but can find no playmate in her cynical husband. He has tried to buy and enjoy the ideal domesticity she embodies, but it is only life and cannot satisfy...
...faithful hunting dogs his best friends. But the strongest performance of the production is Tanya Contos's as Irene. Her reveries and reproaches fill the stage with the past, and she shifts easily back and forth from half-mad laughter to sober despair. Ken Bartel's direction respects Ibsen's carefully built-up structure of recurrent phrases and gestures. The result is a straightforwardly loyal production whose tense sadness is too direct to be shirked...
JOYCE FOUND IN IBSEN a genius "which faces all, shrinks at nothing." This directness is one reason why Ibsen's legacy has been so treasured in the literature of the century, why his one-time reviewer would accord him the singularly Joycean honor of some sixty puns on his name and works within the pages of Finnegan's Wake. It is also the quality which enabled Ibsen--facing his own last awakening unto death--to make his last play so uncompromisingly despairing of art and life...