Word: ibsens
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...Ibsen, whose own uncompromising plays had been harshly excoriated,, wrote much of his own emotion into Dr. Stock-mann. In Stockmann's plight he saw vindicated his distrust of majorities, his feeling that the sheep can be as dangerous as the wolves. "The minority," he wrote to Critic Georg Brandes while working on An Enemy, "is always right." Like Stock-mann, Ibsen would not be silenced; like Stockmann, he accepted almost exultantly the loneliness of leadership...
Certainly Playwright Ibsen stood alone in An Enemy of the People, lashing out in all directions at every class and kind: at the moneybags for being corrupt, at the moderates for being corruptible, at the liberals for being fainthearted, at the mob for being brute-minded. As protest, An Enemy is frequently valid, though as playwriting it is too pat and contrived: the play is less interesting for its social protest than for its individualist scorn...
King Lear, with Louis Calhern in the lead role, opens Chritmas day. One day earlier the ANTA playhouse will follow Judith Anderson with Jose Ferrer and Gloria Swanson in Hecht and MacArthur's Twentieth Century. For those who like Ibsen, and that includes most of the theatre-going public, An Enemy of the People co-stars Frederic March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, in a special adaptation by Arthur Miller...
...over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg-social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius-Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson...
Rosy Prospects. Playwright Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller is working on an adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, and the Theatre Guild is dickering for William Inge's Front Porch. Producers Rodgers & Hammerstein have scheduled Novelist John Steinbeck's Burning Bright, and Producer Cheryl Crawford has Tennessee (A Streetcar Named Desire) Williams' The Rose Tattoo on her schedule. By the time the season is half over, Broadway will probably be seeing Hollywood's Louis Calhern (in King Lear) and Olivia de Havilland (in Romeo and Juliet), besides such stage faithfuls...