Ellen Rees

Melodramatic Traces And Places In The Lady From The Sea

This article considers a series of interconnected questions concerning the stage directions, spectacles, and melodramatic traces in Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 play, Fruen fra Havet (The Lady from the Sea). It is known as a problematic piece, and it breaks with what many have come to expect from Ibsen’s scenography. For most audiences, Ibsen’s drama is synonymous with the stifling bourgeois parlor. Ibsen’s overstuffed sitting rooms have become the epitome of fourth wall drama, and no matter how many companies produce modernist and avant-garde versions of his plays, it is probably these Victorian parlors most of us have in our mind’s eye when we sit down to read or watch an Ibsen play. As written, though, the stage directions for The Lady from the Sea indicate a largely exterior setting, with onlyone of the five acts staged indoors. It ismycontention that the predominantly exterior setting of the play needs to be understood in the context of the visual culture of the nineteenth century, and in particular with the value that it placed on spectacle. In thinking about this play, it is useful to consider the conventions of the Romantic theater and how Ibsen made use of rather than jettisoned them entirely once he abandoned his verse plays and “discovered” realism. Johnston comments that:

By the Open Sea: Ibsen's Fruen fra havet and Fosse's Nokon kjem til å komme

Unlike his predecessor Henrik Ibsen, contemporary Norwegian dramatist Jon Fosse has never attempted to conceal which dramatists have influenced him the most, and along with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Ibsen is famously one of them. Both Ibsen and Fosse have earned solid positions in the canon of world drama. Fosse’s plays enjoy international acclaim, and his engagement with Ibsen’s work is long-standing. To give just two prominent examples, Fosse’s (1997) Barnet [The Child ] was written in intertextual tension with Brand as a commission for the 1996 International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, and he translated Peer Gynt to nynorsk for the 2005 Robert Wilson production in Oslo and Bergen. Rolv Nøtvik Jakobsen points out that attitudes toward the intertextual relationship between Fosse and Ibsen have changed over time; initially critical reception emphasized Fosse’s essential difference from his predecessor, while in more recent criticism the similarities between the two have been highlighted, and Fosse has with increasing frequency been called the new Ibsen ( Jakobsen, 2005, p. 205). Jakobsen argues that comparisons between the two dramatists are almost without exception superficial and more about “branding” than content: “Det er stereotype førestellingar av forfatterskapa som blir samanlikna og ikkje tekst mot tekst, eller forestilling mot forestilling, for den saka si skuld [It is stereotypical notions of the literary projects that are compared and not text to text or performance to performance, for that matter]” ( Jakobsen, 2005, p. 205). At the same time, Jakobsen emphasizes that there are in fact clear affinities and resonances between Fosse and Ibsen as well as August Strindberg, what Jakobsen describes as intertextual “nods” from Fosse:

Ibsen Exposed: Atle Næss’s Sensommer and Niels Fredrik Dahl’s Henrik og Emilie

Abstract In this article the author considers two Norwegian fictionalizations of the historical figure Henrik Ibsen. Building on theories of biographical fiction and biographical theater, the author examines how contemporary writers Atle Næss and Niels Fredrik Dahl represent Ibsen’s body in the novel Sensommer (1987) and the play Henrik og Emilie (2006) respectively, and explores the implications of how this focus on Ibsens corporeality affects his reception and canonization. The author finds that both authors employ a discourse of impotence and intimacy, which reinforces the more speculative elements of ostensibly factual biographical writing about Ibsen.

Problems of landscape and representation in Ibsen's Når vi døde vågner

In his introduction to Henrik Ibsen’s (1936) Når vi døde vågner, Didrik Arup Seip relays a telling exchange between Ibsen and fellow dramatist Gunnar Heiberg regarding the scenography for the 1900 Norwegian National Theatre production of the play. According to Seip (1936): “Ibsen spurte Gunnar Heiberg hvad han syntes om dekorasjonene – ‘Forferdelige,’ svarte Gunnar Heiberg. Da blev Ibsen ‘barsk og sagde med indædt Raseri og høi, hurtig Stemme: Ja jeg synes heller ikke, det ser slig ud paa Hardangervidden [Ibsen asked Gunnar Heiberg what he thought about the scenography – ‘Appalling,’ answered Gunnar Heiberg. Ibsen then became ‘fierce and said with suppressed rage and a loud, rapid voice: Yes, I don’t think it looks like that on the Hardanger plateau either]” (p. 208). This anecdote reveals a conceptual gap between Ibsen’s artistic vision and the possibilities of representing that vision on stage. We see here that Ibsen sought a visual realism that has for the most part become the domain of cinematic rather than theatrical representation in the century after Ibsen’s death. In this article I will discuss the stage directions in Når vi døde vågner as written and as they have been interpreted in the seven productions of the play that have been staged at Norway’s National Theatre. I want to direct attention to the aporia between Ibsen’s text and what theater scholar Michael Issacharoff (1981) calls the “dramatic space” of individual productions of a play. Issacharoff distinguishes between on-stage mimetic space that is made visible to the audience and off-stage diegetic space that is only referenced by the characters. What I have observed is that by prioritizing abstraction of the mimetic space, the major Norwegian twentiethcentury productions of Når vi døde vågner have so disregarded important elements of the original stage directions that a number of serious ruptures in meaning result.

TROPOLOGICAL TURNS IN PEER GYNT 1

The Bøjg’s advice to ‘‘gaa udenom’’ (108) [‘‘go round and about’’ (49)] in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt from 1867 is most often interpreted figuratively, metaphorically, and symbolically. It would, so it seems, be absurd to believe that the Bøjg is as ‘‘real’’ as Peer himself, yet in a very obvious way they are equally virtual, both being characters in a fictional dramatic poem. Peer’s encounter with the Bøjg replicates the more literal and oft-repeated physical gestures of turning aside, turning away and turning back that permeate the text. In addition to his actual physical movement, Peer repeatedly uses verbal strategies that echo them. I contend that these acts of turning mimic the structure of the text, which is also built up of turns. I am thus using the term ‘‘turn’’ in a physical, a rhetorical, an ethical, and a dramaturgical sense. In the analysis that follows I will work through the three types of turning that take place within the text itself as tools for explicating the ways in which Peer Gynt problematizes subject formation metapoetically. I will also argue against critical attempts to impose a hierarchical structure on the text, which I view instead as self-consciously amorphous. Despite the long history of reading the dramatic poem from within a Cartesian philosophical framework (primarily through the lens of Hegel), I believe it is most productive to think of Peer Gynt in Deleuzian terms, as a text that questions the very nature of representation and aesthetic unity through its rejection of conventional literary form and its over-abundance of interpretable episodes, characters, places, and words. I will attempt to use my

Post-Secular Salvation: Hallvard Bræin's Gatas Gynt

This article considers Hallvard Braein’s 2008 film adaptation of Peer Gynt in light of theories of the post-secular. It argues that the film presents a post-secular interpretation of the ambiguous message of salvation at the end of Ibsen’s dramatic poem. Through a combination of analysis of the film itself and examination of its production history, the article evaluates to what degree the film expresses a specifically Christian notion of salvation, and suggests that it opens for non-dogmatic interpretations of what salvation might mean, and who exactly is in need of it in the post-secular era. An examination of the who, what, when, and where of this adaptation (Hutcheon 2006) identifies how the filmmakers use Ibsen’s original text as a vehicle for a specific social message regarding the plight of people suffering from substance abuse and homelessness in contemporary Norway.

Hvordan lese Ibsen? Samtalen om hans dramatikk 1879–2015

Introduction Erik Bjerck Hagen is an engaging and often polemical scholar committed to a narrative about the study of literature in which – essentially – little scholarship of value is produced after 1970, or better yet after World War II. In his latest book, he sets out to prove this in relation to Ibsen scholarship. The core of his argument is that scholars who attempt to use critical theory to interpret Ibsen add nothing substantive to what we already know through the insights and hard work of earlier critics and scholars. Hagen points out that Hvordan lese Ibsen? is “like mye en bok om norsk forskningsog kritikkhistorie som om Ibsen” (9) [just as much a book about the history of Norwegian research and criticism as about Ibsen]. This is an ambitious claim that requires extensive empirical data and careful analysis to support. The book’s greatest strength is that it unearths a great deal of insightful Ibsen criticism that, as Hagen rightly points out, contemporary scholars have neglected or ignored for far too long. Hagen chooses five of Ibsen’s works and then dedicates a chapter to each, in which he establishes an interpretive consensus for the play in question, and then discusses a handful of theory-informed readings of it that he views as misguided. The methodological problems with this approach should be glaringly obvious. The four post1970 analyses of A Doll House that Hagen chooses to engage with, for example, are in no way representative; they are simply four analyses with which Hagen happens to disagree. His critiques of the scholarship are in many cases insightful, interesting, and always engagingly written, but to extrapolate further that this says anything meaningful about the state of Norwegian Ibsen scholarship as a whole after

Fables of the Norwegian Intelligentsia

Nina Witoszek has, for nearly two decades, provided wideranging, creative, and sustained analyses of what makes Norwegian society tick. In numerous articles and books, she has promulgated a series of hypotheses that explain both why Norway has become one of—if not the—best places to live on earth, while at the same time also theorizing the darker sides of this ostensibly idyllic nation. In The Origins of the “Regime of Goodness,” Witoszek distills and expands upon her earlier work, to produce a cohesive argument for how and why Norway in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has become what Terje Tveit has called a “regime of goodness” (quoted in Witoszek, p. 13)—a self-appointed exporter of benevolence and moral conscience to the world. Witoszek holds a doctorate in comparative literature, although her position at the University of Oslo is in the Centre for Development and the Environment. Further, the bulk of her publications have examined subjects such as ecophilosophy, development studies, and social criticism. She has also published literary works, including the short story collection Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia (1991; under the pen name Nina FitzPatrick). For someone not familiar with her important body of work, The Origins of the “Regime of Goodness” is the perfect introduction to her vision of the Norwegian nation. Those who have been following her work, however, should be aware that there is a great deal of overlap with previous publications. In the book’s unpaginated colophon, Witoszek notes: “This book expands on and further develops the ideas first launched in Norske naturmytologier—fra Edda til okofilosofi”

Hamsun i Tromsø V: Rapport fra den 5. internasjonale Hamsun-konferansen, 2011 by Even Arntzen, Nils M. Knutsen, Henning Howlid Wærp (review)

Enckell) reviewed in Scandinavian Studies (62:243–6, 1990). The undertones of a culture’s decline and fall in Ekman’s collection are unsettling, if one cares or dares to detect and ponder them. But Ekman is a cool-headed (if occasionally circumstantial) demonstrator, not a dramatizer, and richly merits the Mauritz Hallberg Prize awarded him by the Swedish Literary Society in Finland. George C. Schoolfield Yale University