Word: ibsenism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strong, scrupulous and thoroughly rewarding revival of Ibsen's A Doll's House now graces off-Broadway. Matching the exquisite delicacy of her features, Claire Bloom moves with emotional assurance from the early phase of the wife as kept puppet to the later phase of the woman who issues an emancipation proclamation to her husband. The larky girlishness of the early Nora is always a bit of a problem, but Miss Bloom manages to be a trifle giddy without appearing inane. As the later Nora, her performance is informed with a grave clarity...
...appears in his photographs. He was in high spirits and conversation was lively. It was about history, literature, music, philosophy, ethics, the demonic element in the creative process, and a good deal else which I have never felt at liberty to repeat. He also talked of Goethe, Byron, Wagner, Ibsen, Emerson, Brahms, of his own preference in working hours, of what to do when the spring refusesto flow, and about his relationship with his publishers...
...others managed?" Replies a piano salesman played by Edward G. Robinson: "You mean Schubert and Liszt, for example?" When Grieg enters the Scandinavian Club in Rome, the clerk informs him, "A countryman of yours was asking for you." Grieg asks, "Who's that?" Replies the clerk: "Mr. Ibsen...
...lights go down, the audience at London's Cambridge Theater looks up expecting to see the familiar opening scene of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler -Hedda's new husband nattering away with his auntie. Instead, in a startling departure from the script, Maggie Smith as Hedda strides silently onto the empty stage. Clad severely in white, she is pale and tense, her features a mask of mortal exhaustion and despair that might have been painted by Edvard Munch. She smokes, paces, contemplates herself in a mirror, stares moodily, doubles over in a spasm of nausea...
...more symbolic setting is a tendency toward abstractness. For Miss Smith, the cost of replacing the outwardly thwarted new woman of Hedda's day with a more inwardly racked characterization is a slight taint of the clinical case history. But both transactions are bargains. In place of Ibsen's now somewhat dated "modernity," Bergman's and Miss Smith's theatricality seems timelessly contemporary...