Word: ibsens
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ASSOCIATION OF PRODUCING ARTISTS, Hollywood, Calif. The APA returns to the Huntington Hartford Theater for a ten-week season ending Sept. 16. The program includes Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the Pirandello puzzler, Right You Are If You Think You Are, George Kelly's The Show-Off, and the American premiere of Pantagleize, by De Ghelderode...
Apparently he couldn't play the flute. In Ibsen's The Wild Duck, Hjalmar Ekdal renders "with sentimental expression" a brief passage from a Bohemian folk-dance. In the Adams House version he is about to let loose when the door conveniently swings open, and we never hear a note...
Such problems abound in James Burt's production of The Wild Duck. But even if there are faults more glaring than the lack of flute music, they can't cripple a show so liberally marked with hard work and competence. Ibsen is not often staged at Harvard; drama students read him and study him, but rarely see him or perform him. Now Adams House has tackled one of his most difficult plays and come out, if precariously...
...Ibsen, The Wild Duck was something of a dramatic non-sequitur. In it he consciously defied the vital premise of much of his earlier (and later) work; that truth must inevitably conquer falsehood. Ekdal, the central character, has lost both fortune and prestige in a grisly episode involving his father's illegal use of government lumber. The father, a broken man, is surviving on the charity of his guilty old friend Werle, who was also involved in the scandal but was acquitted for lack of evidence. In the last 15 years, both Ekdal and his father have built...
...these deceptions are summed up in the title character, or, if you prefer, title bird. It is a wild duck, but it lives inside. And the question posed by Ibsen's play is whether such an incongruity should not be permitted to last even when it fosters happiness, whether innocence cannot sometimes be desirable...