Word: ibsenism
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When Alia Nazimova revived Ghosts on Broadway last week Reviewer Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, in line with the current critical tendency to regard the plays of Henrik Ibsen as dated, called the drama "only a temperate statement of an ugly thought with a milk-&-gruel attack upon authority and pious idealism." Nevertheless, nobody but Eugene Brieux has since staged the tragedy of venereal inheritance so terribly as Ibsen. As for timeliness, the final "mercy murder" in Ghosts might have been cribbed from last month's front pages (TIME, Nov. 18 et seq.). At any rate...
...that night's, she asked us which one we considered, the better. We finally remarked, after a natural hesitation, on the tenseness which we had noticed even more that evening. (In fact, the air seemed to vibrate with the suppressed emotion.) Nazimova also considered the performance that night of Ibsen's "Ghosts" more polished, for as she explained, there had been a rehearsal, she assured us, was much more tiring than the performance itself...
Nazimova's knowledge of Ibsen is very great. To her, his plays are of just as much force now as ever, "There is still a great deal of hypocrisy in the world," she said. "I do not lie, for it does me no good, but merely confuses me. I lied like all children, but when I got older, I saw the worthlessness of lying. People hide their thoughts today just as in "Ghosts" because of a sense of duty and false pride. Ibsen saw this miserable state and shocked people with his writings, but the mistakes of a half century...
...Ibsen's character portrayal forces his characters to walk a straight line from the beginning to the end of a play. All the action comes naturally from the characters personality." When we asked her opinion of Ibsen's women characters and ventured to say that they were not as well delineated as the men, she turned on us and asked our reasons for such a statement...
...illustrate strength of emotion and truth of characterization in Ibsen's plays, she told a performance of his "Enemy of the People" in Moscow, where the audience divided itself into two camps in the theatre...