Word: ibsenism
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...Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken may be the sort of static introspective play that is actually better read than seen. If faultlessly performed it might make robust drama, but the current production by the Theatre Company of Boston is not faultless...
When We Dead Awaken is the last thing Ibsen wrote, a "dramatic epilogue" dated 1899. An aging sculptor, Professor Arnold Rubek, begins to question the cult of creativity to which he has consecrated his life. Simultaneously he regrets his commitment to art and his declining powers as an artist. The creative urge still gnaws at him, but he cannot recover the idealistic dedication he had as a young...
Rubek speaks for a disillusioned Ibsen. The occasional awkwardness of When We Dead Awaken and the bitterness of its themes have a common source. Its anguish is the pessimism of a 71-year-old dramatist who would never compose another Master-Builder or Hedda Gabler. When We Dead Awaken is not a fitting conclusion to Ibsen's career. Especially in the third act, set on a mountain peak, Ibsen resorts to artificial contrivances that are not characteristic...
...production at the Hotel Bostonian does not muster enough reserve to pull off the play's melodramatic interludes. If the actors performed in a more genteel, more Victorian key, they might be able to speak Ibsen's moody lines more comfortably. Their aggressive, coloquial style tends to rinse away the realism which Ibsen wanted to achieve...
...love any more; Broadway has not seen an old-fashioned nonmusical love story in years. This is intimately linked to the image of the modern woman, who does not seem real, at least onstage, unless she can spar, jaw-to-jaw and eyeball-to-eyeball, with her man. As Ibsen would have been the first to recognize, Nora competes at home nowadays, and the doll's house is a boxing ring. It is this laughter of inner recognition that greets Pussycat. All truly modern love stories end in just one way: "They scrapped happily ever after...