Henrik Ibsen is widely regarded as the first “modern” playwright. His experimentation with form and style — ranging from grim realism to surreal fantasia and psychological melodrama — was matched by his boldness in treating subject matter that was widely considered taboo. Ibsen’s characters reject broken marriages and stifling social conventions, seeking to free themselves from the constraints of bourgeois propriety.
While the patrician class of Norway in the 19th century is rigorously critiqued by Ibsen, the plays themselves rarely escape this late-industrial context. Translations into English can seem a little stiff and Victorian. As with Shakespeare (the only playwright staged more often than Ibsen), there are plenty of productions each year that aim for “fidelity” in rendering an “authentic” setting, plot and characterisation.
But when (as with Shakespeare) Ibsen is approached with less reverence, and the play texts are seen as malleable works that readily present themselves for updating and adapting, the results can be truly revelatory. Instead of looking at the dilemmas Ibsen’s characters face as something that happened long ago, we are forced instead to recognise that they remain our contemporaries — even in a post-postindustrial, post-postmodern world. SA audiences have the opportunity to (re)discover Ibsen in two invigorating productions onstage in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
At the Theatre on the Square in Sandton until June 7, the Quickening Theatre Company presents Lucas Hnath’s A Doll's House: Part 2. Nora Helmer, the heroine of Ibsen’s Doll House, is a proto-feminist icon who walks out on her callous husband Torvald (and, more contentiously, their three children) when she realises that she will never be free as a married woman in a patriarchal society. Doll House ends with her famous slamming of the door as she leaves; in Hnath’s sequel, played in this production by the redoubtable Bianca Amato, she returns 15 years later through the same door.
SA audiences have the opportunity to (re)discover Ibsen in two invigorating productions onstage in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
What follows is a fascinating overlapping series of dialogues. There is the intertextual relationship between the two plays, of course, though the relevant action of “part one” is deftly relayed in “part two” so even audiences who don’t know the outline of the original quickly learn the backstory. There is the friction between Nora and her various selves: she is now a successful author who writes behind a pseudonym, and in her first novel she fictionalised her own story, so she exists as different “characters” beyond the room in which the action takes place.
And then there are Nora’s dialogues with those she left behind: the faithful nanny Anne Marie (Charlotte Butler), her fiercely independent daughter Emmy (Simone Neethling) and the chastened but still resentful Torvald (Zane Meas). Ibsen’s Nora was dismissed by misogynistic critics as “a philosopher in skirts” — too quick to stand on a metaphorical soapbox and rail against her imprisonment. Yet her diagnosis of the legal, economic, political and social chains that kept women bound was entirely accurate.
Hnath’s Nora has not lost any of her convictions, but her situation is complicated by renewed dependence on her old family. After she and Torvalt trade verbal (and almost physical) blows, however, they rekindle enough tenderness to release one another from the shackles of their former relationship.
There is no such reconciliation between any of the characters in Christiaan Olwagen’s version of Hedda Gabler, which is at the Baxter Theatre until May 24. This production ratchets up both the dark comedy and the bleak outlook of Ibsen’s play — whose heroine is, like Nora, exasperated by the tedium and narrowness of middle-class morality, but whose rebellion takes a more destructive form.
Whereas Nora is proud of her novels because they offer women liberation, Hedda is disdainful of the petty academic rivalries that generate books. Not for her the intellectual posturing of men who think their ideas are important; desperate to make her mark on the world, she resorts to the artistry of seduction and violence.
Olwagen’s impressive ensemble, which previously performed his Afrikaans translation before this English run, takes the audience from social satire to the refuge of hedonism as a final, failing bulwark against despair. Designer Rocco Pool’s set is, by the play’s end, littered with the colourful and brutal detritus of a collective downfall. It is devastating but somehow, in accordance with Hedda’s wishes, sublimely “beautiful”.
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