Word: ibsenism
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...like the results they get hell," he says. Certainly he leaves the finer points of culture to others. Once, when ATV was shooting an excerpt from The Master Builder, he asked an aide: "How's the Shakespeare coming along?" The aide murmured that it was Ibsen, not Shakespeare. "Well," said Sir Lew, "it's all costume...
Finally he found a girl, a handsome, forceful young woman named Suzannah Thoresen. After only two meetings, Ibsen begged her to marry him and make him "something great in the world." From the first, says Meyer, it was a marriage of creative convenience. Day after day, Suzannah packed him off to commune with his scorpion, whipped up his flagging spirits, shooed his time-wasting friends away. "Ibsen had no steel in his character," she said flatly. "I gave it to him." The steel soon made its mark. In 1863, Ibsen wrote The Pretenders, his first popular success. On the strength...
...Suburban Lady Macbeth." In the earlier, social plays, Ibsen's drama was the drama of contemporary issues: the characters are living ideas. Dr. Stock-mann, the idealist who heroically fights to improve his community in An Enemy of the People, reappears in The Wild Duck as Gregers Werle, a pre-Freudian busybody who demonstrates that helping people face their problems is often just a bland way of destroying them. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Nora, the relatively innocent victim of male chauvinism in A Doll's House, is re-examined as Hedda, a modern woman whose frustrated need...
After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene...
...Ibsen himself spent the last six years of his life, unable to write, staring out of his window in Christiania. "Leave that to me," he snapped at a visitor who asked how he felt about God. And one day, when a nurse announced that he was feeling better, the old curmudgeon found the ultimate putdown. "On the contrary!" he said, and died. · Brad Darrach