Ibsen on Theatre

Introduction

.As long as a nation considers it more important to build chapels than theatres, as long as it is more ready and willing to support the Zulu Mission than the Art Museum, the arts cannot expect to thrive in good health; yes, they will not even be considered a day-to-day necessity. I do not think it helps a lot to plead for the arts with arguments based on its own nature, which is still hardly understood at home, or rather, is thoroughly misunderstood. What we must do first of all, is to attack and scrupulously eradicate the dark, medieval monkishness which blinkers perception and makes people stupid. My meaning is: for the moment, we cannot use our weapons to fight for the arts, but against hostility to the arts. Wipe that out first, and then we can start building.

Letter to Lorentz Dietrichson,19 January 1882

Three new productions of plays by Ibsen open somewhere in the world every week. As a playwright so firmly associated with the rise of modern drama in the late nineteenth century and the spread of spoken word theatre across the globe during the early twentieth century, readers might have suspected that Henrik Ibsen's importance is dwindling in this century. Yet the 20,440 records in IbsenStage, the database of international Ibsen performances, show the opposite: the frequency of global productions has steadily increased over the past thirty years. While Ibsen's plays have been associated historically with theatres of modernity, today they are adapted into multiple genres: Chinese and Western Opera forms, Japanese Noh theatre, puppet plays, musicals, dance performances, tourist spectacles, promenade performances, applied theatre, community events, and every possible screen technology. In addition to the plethora of global adaptations of his plays recorded in IbsenStage-performed in 8,592 venues by 80,178 artists in 244 countries, and translated into sixty-seven languages-Ibsen's dramas are included in educational curricula on five continents.1

When Nick Hern invited us to edit an Ibsen volume for the .On Theatre series, we were confronted with a problem. Ibsen wrote twenty-six plays, but the more successful he became as a playwright the more reluctant he was to make public statements about the practice of theatre, even regarding his own works. There are no polemical writings by Ibsen, other than the articles he wrote as a young man advocating a Norwegian national theatre. Ibsen's thoughts on the art form must be gleaned from prefaces to the reprints of early plays, approximately 2,400 letters, and the speeches he gave at functions held in his honour. All of these documents contain fascinating reflections by Ibsen on theatre and are available online through Henrik Ibsens skrifter HIS (www.ibsen.uio.no), but they are fragments within texts devoted to other subjects-and are only available in Norwegian. We have gathered these fragments together, translated them into English, and created a volume dedicated to Ibsen's views on theatre production, casting, translation, the business of theatre, and most importantly his own plays.2

Translations of Ibsen's letters, speeches, articles, and prefaces into English have appeared periodically throughout the twentieth century. Approximately a quarter of the Ibsen letters held in HIS are available in three edited collections published in English in 1908, 1910 and 1965.3 The plays have also been translated in numerous editions, most of which have introductions with references to critical literature, dramatic sources, important contemporary productions, and significant quotations from Ibsen. The eight volumes of The Oxford Ibsen edited by James MacFarlane (1960-77) still provide the most extensive of these commentaries, but recent editions featuring new translations and scholarly introductions are currently being published in the New Penguin Ibsen series edited by Tore (2014, 2016). There are major biographies written or translated into English by Robert Ferguson (1996), Michael Meyer (1967-71), Hans Heiberg (1967), Halvdan Koht (1928-29), Edmund Gosse (1907) and Henrik Jæger (1888). These biographies contain important anecdotal information on Ibsen's views on theatre as well as extracts from his letters, reported speech, and early critical writings. Just as Ibsen's comments on theatre exist as fragments in his own writing on other subjects, they also exist as fragments within these biographical studies. The originality of Ibsen on Theatre lies in its arrangement of these writings into a narrative that delivers background research to readers embarking on a production, an adaptation, or a scholarly project.

After a short introduction to Ibsen, written by Ibsen and his contemporaries, the following four chapters are devoted to Ibsen's writings on his plays. They contain his views on the creative process, reflections on characters, suggestions for staging and production advice. The extracts are organised by play title following the chronology of composition, in accord with the letter Ibsen addressed to the readers of his collected works published in 1898:

March 1898 to the Readers

When my publisher kindly suggested publishing a chronological edition of my collected literary works, I immediately realised the great advantages this would offer for a better understanding of the texts.

A younger generation of readers has grown up during the course of my writing career, and I have often noticed with regret that their knowledge of my more recent works is considerably more comprehensive than that of my earlier ones. Consequently, these readers fail to be aware of the internal connections between the works, and I conclude that this oversight plays a not insignificant part in the strange, inadequate and misleading interpretations my later works have been subjected to from so many quarters.

Only by comprehending and grasping my entire production as a continuous and coherent whole will one be able to form an appropriate intended impression of its individual parts.

My friendly appeal to the reader is therefore, in so many words, that he will not put any play aside for the moment or skip anything, but that he absorbs the works-by perusing them and experiencing them intimately-in the order in which I wrote them.

The two chapters that follow Ibsen's writings on his plays address his involvement in the business world of nineteenth-century European theatre. The first of these chapters concerns the strategies he used to supervise the translation of his plays into multiple languages, and to circumvent the lack of international copyright available to nineteenth-century writers working in little-known languages. To maximise his earnings, Ibsen insisted that his plays should be published before they were performed, which explains why he refers to his 'books' rather than his 'plays' in so much of his correspondence. A detailed analysis of Ibsen's accounts from 1870 to 1900 has shown that 44 per cent of his income from writing came from performances and 56 per cent came from publication.4 By contrast, successful playwrights today earn several times more from performances than publication. The business theme is further developed in the last chapter, which focuses on Ibsen's negotiations with theatre managements, particularly at the Christiania Theater in Norway. It reveals a fascinating narrative of a shifting power relationship between a playwright and his national theatre.5

Appendix 1 is dedicated to Ibsen's early critical writings. These extracts come from the articles and reviews written by Ibsen in the early years of his theatre life while studying and working in Kristiania and Bergen. It focuses on his contribution to the debates on the creation of an authentic Norwegian theatre and uncovers a polemical aspect to his thinking as well as an intellectual generosity. As most of this material has not appeared previously in English translation, it provides a new perspective on Ibsen's involvement in the history of a Norwegian national theatre, as well as revealing his views on the integration of traditional source material within an emergent national dramaturgy.

Appendix 2 contains biographical notes on the recipients of Ibsen's letters and other authors quoted in this book; brief introductions are also included when these individuals are mentioned for the first time in the text. Finally, a Select Bibliography is attached, together with links to digital resources. The links to records in the IbsenStage database on the performances mentioned in the book can be found in the endnotes to each chapter.

1. These figures represent the total IbsenStage records as of 1 March 2017.

2. Sources for extracts originally published in English can be found in the bibliography. Michael Morley provided new translations for the letters in this collection that were written by Ibsen in German and French.

3. Speeches and new letters [of] Henrik Ibsen (1910), translated by Arne Kildal; Letters of Henrik Ibsen (1905), translated by John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary Morison; Ibsen. Letters and Speeches (1965), edited by Evert Sprinchorn.

4. See Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem (2017, 201-5) for this analysis of Ibsen's separate income from publication and performance.

5. The capital of Norway assumed the name of Oslo in 1924. For three hundred years, it was...