Word: ibsenism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...IBSEN by Michael Meyer. 865 pages. Doubleday...
...Henrik Ibsen kept a live scorpion in an empty beer glass on his writing table. "From time to time the brute would ail; then I would throw in a piece of ripe fruit, on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison; then it was well again." As usual in an Ibsen scene, opera glasses are not needed to recognize the symbolism. Tiny, armored, venomous, Ibsen was an ailing spirit whose dramas stung the 19th century's conscience and gave European theater a new seriousness. After launching into poetic tragedy (Brand, Peer Gynt), Ibsen imported...
Because she concentrated so fiercely on the brutalizing effects of power and money, Ivy Compton-Burnett has often been accused of being pitiless and even amoral. She was as unsparing as Ibsen in visiting the sins of parents on their children, and there are few more starkly evil women in literature than the murderous Anna Donne in Elders and Betters...
When Arthur Miller adapted Ibsen's play in 1950, he was greatly concerned about the abuses of McCarthyism. The wheel of history having turned, present-day audiences will be much more caught up in the ecological aspects of the play. It is ironic that while audiences will root for Stockmann on this contemporary issue, they would probably spurn him as an arrogant elitist if he were running for political office. As unyieldingly committed as was Ibsen himself to the prior claims of the individual conscience, intellect, character and will. Stockmann has no use for "the solid majority...
Another mighty playwright, Ibsen, offers an equivalent role for a woman in Hedda Gabler. The sad thing about the current off-Broadway revival is that the inner life that Claire Bloom brings to it is chilly, prim and pallid. The inner life is extremely important to Hedda, for otherwise what is left is the story of a kind of grown-up "bad seed," a woman who out of casual malice or native bitchiness burns her would-be lover's brilliant manuscript, pushes him back to drink and gives him a pistol with instructions to shoot himself...