The Lady from the Sea Dolgin, Ellen
Ibsen news and comment,
01/2015, Volume:
35
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Rather than raise a flag, Ballested admires Bolette's flowers, a choice that sharpens the focus on the important symbol in the first act, in which flowers are used to celebrate, to rekindle feelings, ...or to serve as remembrance, thus establishing emotional states and reminders of a past that renders the image of a happy family illusory. Apart from the suggestion of rot, to announce this dire psychological diagnosis so quickly is preemptive, as audiences are now prompted to see Ellida as far more ill than Ibsen's dialogue for her in the opening act suggests. ...the tempo slows down in the scene of crisis, when the Stranger claims Ellida but says that if she goes with him, it will be because of her own volition.
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32.
The Master Builder Earnest, Steve
Ibsen news and comment,
01/2015, Volume:
35
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Among Castorf's earliest efforts were plays by Ibsen beginning in 1985 with A Dolls House at Theater Anklam (his first resident director position), John Gabriel Borkman in 1991 at Deutsches Theater ...(a production that was invited to the Theatertreffen), and The Lady from the Sea at the Volksbühne in 1993, his first season as Artistic Director. Castorf employs three basic styles of acting: a very realistic, filmic style, which often involves cameras onstage; a flamboyant style that roughly approximates Reichskanzlerstil, the style used during the Third Reich, in which actors scream for extended periods of time and use exaggerated facial and arm gestures; and a direct delivery that comments on certain moments in the play, asks for the audience's responses, and basically steps outside the story to comment on the text, society, or something else. Ideas about love relationships between the old and young, and the familiar notion of the older man and younger woman were offered in videos, projected images, and music; a number of folk "love songs" were also included.
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This essay presents and studies Francoist state censorship of Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) from 1940 until 1966. It argues that A Doll's House is a paradigm case to understand, first, how Francoism ...dealt with emancipatory foreign high culture, and second, how Francoism operated its radical rupture with values and practices of the Spanish Second Republic. Under Franco, Ibsen's play was banned, or rewritten, or contained in several other ways, and Nora's behavior was de-normalized as madness. From the mid-1960s onward, conversely, there are signs that prominent opponents of Francoism, such as Alfonso Sastre and Carmen Martín Gaite, made efforts to rehabilitate Ibsen as a counterfigure to Francoist culture.
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A magnificent new biography of Henrik Ibsen, among the greatest of modern playwrights Henrik Ibsen (1820-1908) is arguably the most important playwright of the nineteenth century. Globally he remains ...the most performed playwright after Shakespeare, andHedda Gabler,A Doll's House,Peer Gynt, andGhostsare all masterpieces of psychological insight. This is the first full-scale biography to take a literary as well as historical approach to the works, life, and times of Ibsen. Ivo de Figueiredo shows how, as a man, Ibsen was drawn toward authoritarianism, was absolute in his judgments over others, and resisted the ideas of equality and human rights that formed the bases of the emerging democracies in Europe. And yet as an artist, he advanced debates about the modern individual's freedom and responsibility-and cultivated his own image accordingly. Where other biographies try to show how the artist creates the art, this book reveals how, in Ibsen's case, the art shaped the artist.
This article analyses Deepan Sivaraman's 2012 production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1876) and argues that the production's scenography evoked scepticism toward the Indian nation-state. This ...scepticism came as a direct consequence of the scenography's ability to alienate the audience through the formation of dark ecological environments, with the help of three characters: the elf princess, the son of the elf princess, and a hell hound, a concept invented by Sivaraman while adapting the verse play of the Norwegian playwright into Malayalam and English. The dark ecological aesthetics of the production functioned like Bertolt Brecht's Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt, offering a dialectical point to the audience to reterritorialize their understanding of the Indian nation-state and its ecology. In the first part of the article, I analyse the Indian dramatic form of
bhana
used by Sivaraman to articulate the discourse of what Timothy Morton calls 'dark ecology,' and argue that the
bhana
's satirical narrative remained central to writings of Otherness. In the second part of the article, I demonstrate how the production mounted imbricated narratives of ecological awareness on the stage through the figures of the elf princess, her son, and a hell hound that relentlessly witnessed the capitalist journey of Peer. By offering an active agency to these figures through the scenography, Sivaraman's production interrogated the Indian nation-state's definition of ecology. Significantly, in its choice of a non-human witness, the production destabilized the human centre and pointed towards a post-human ecological turn. Although Ibsen's aesthetics have been used countless times in India to stage the anxieties of the female gender and minority communities, this was the first time they were employed in India to stage dark ecology; Sivaraman's production began where Ibsen's play ends. In the first scene itself, the audience members found themselves face to face with Peer's spirit - rather than the flesh and blood Peer of Ibsen's play - begging God for another chance at life so that he could become a better man. When Peer is offered a second chance, he uncannily uses it to become a non-resident businessman involved in mining. The performance showed how scenography could be used to articulate a dark and depressing ecological awareness.
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...this living arrangement raises suspicions in outsiders and even in the faithful housekeeper. Shaw's undiminished, perhaps even heightened, enthusiasm for the play appeared again when he reviewed ...the 1895 production brought to London by Aurélien Lugné-Poě's Théátre de l'Oeuvre: "the first act of Rosmersholm had hardly begun on Monday night, when I recognized, with something like excitement, the true atmosphere of this most enthralling of all Ibsen's works rising like an enchanted mist for the first time on an English stage" (Shaw 1932, 1:72). ...he was not averse to taking the issues raised by an Ibsen play and giving them a comic spin, a change he had explicitly worked on A Doll House in his early play The Philanderer, written in 1893, almost twenty years before Pygmalion. ...the fact that the striking repetition between the two plays appears primarily at the level of deep structure and is well hidden by glaring "surface" differences in tone, style, emplotment, and genre suggests that the rewriting was likely a disguised one-disguised, that is, to the author, just as Freud says the threatening, latent meaning of the dream is disguised to the dreamer.
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38.
IBSEN'S SOULCRAFT Valiūnas, Algis
First things (New York, N.Y.),
12/2019
298
Journal Article
The critic and translator Michael Meyer quotes at length from these remarks in Ibsen: A Biography: An element of aristocracy must enter into our political life, our government, our members of ...parliament and our press. The belief that democracy's highest purpose was not universal equality but the nurturing of select noble souls has had a number of artistic devotees, from Verdi to Frank Lloyd Wright to Saul Bellow; but it flared most brightly in the hopeful days of democracy's birth, and especially among German-speaking artists and thinkers. When the doctor tells him that unless he takes his wife and child someplace warm the boy will not survive the winter, Brand insists that his duty to his congregation must keep him in the freezing mountains. Because he lacks the virtue the doctor held up to him, humaneness, the would-be saint turns out to be no more than a mad zealot.
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The author interprets Henryk Ibsen’s last drama, which is an epilogue of a series of plays started with the A Doll’s House, which did not enjoy much interest of contemporary readers and later ...researchers. The precise composition of the play, the revealed encounters of realistic and symbolic space, the alienation of reality and its phantasmic shape, and the ontologically uncertain status of the protagonists are analysed. The article demonstrates how Ibsen’s work on an artist proves to carry aporetic meanings, indicating that the most important obligation of man is to experience his own life, especially love wholeheartedly, but at the same time stating that only a suppressed libido can be a source of art. An attempt to solve this unresolvable contradiction is the vision of the resurrection, the central axis of the drama, which acquires aesthetic, existential, and eschatological significance
Editor's Column Templeton, Joan
Ibsen news and comment,
01/2018, Volume:
38
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
...the contrast between the realism of the U.S. production and the post-realism of the European one, including an ice rink and a tsunami-the fruit, of course, of lavish state subsidies-is startling. ...The falling price of crude oil caused substantial cuts in the National Theatre's budget and reduced the Ibsen Festival, held biennially in Oslo, from three weeks to twelve days. Runi Sveen, the National Theatre's Artistic Director, said that given this constraint, the Board decided to concentrate on non-Norwegian directors-to have "the other eye" on Ibsen.
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