Theatre in the home | HENRIK IBSEN
April 6th 2010 08:12
:
Ibsen on DVD
Category: Reviews
HENRIK IBSEN
Norwegian playwright, Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. He moved away from the Romantic style, and brought the problems and ideas of the day onto the stage of his time.
This BBC Classics Collection of works by Ibsen is value packed for any theatre lover or student studying literature and drama. It is rare to see his work these days because by today's standards it is very old classic theatre, and maybe a little less than commercial. Many would say his plays are not very engaging. Not dramatic enough - however in his day Ibsen was quite the shocker.
These BBC productions are all of a very high quality featuring some truly remarkable performances. The production standards are very high, and the work is as much a tribute to the BBC as it is to the great playwright. I think anyone who harkens back to intellegent entertainment on the television will really enjoy sinking a few hours into the productions presented here.
The collection is not limited to stage plays, we hear many radio productions of the great writers work, and these are well worth the energy. Much of Ibsens work is challenging.
One of his best known plays, A Doll's House (1879) was a social drama, which caused a sensation in its day. In the play a woman refuses to obey her husband and walks out from her apparently perfect marriage, her life in the dolls house. This subject and content was a massive departure for the theatre going public. Here was a play dealing with contemporary issues, up close and personal. At the turn-of-the-century physicians used Nora, whose mood changes from joy to depression in short cycles of time, as an example of female hysteria.
Ghosts (1881) touched the forbidden subject of hereditary venereal disease. The London Daily Telegraph called the play an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house wit all its doors and windows open. Judi Dench and Michael Gambon feature in the intense production from 1987. A compelling production.
Peer Gynt (1867) was an epic play intended as a reading drama; not a play to stage, although it has been staged many times very successfully, on this set of dvd's it is included as a radio play; brilliant. The title role of Peer magnificently performed by Ralph Richardson.
In An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen attacked the compact liberal majority and the mass opinion.
Hedda Gabler (1890) was a study of a neurotic woman. Oscar Wilde, after attending the play, wrote: "I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek." Hedda, twenty-nine years old, has married down, is pregnant with an unwanted child, and bored by her husband. Before marriage she has flirted with the drunken poet Loevborg, a portrait of the playwright Strindberg, who hated Ibsen.
He was a very popular man in his time, more or less a celebrity. After spending a couple months in Norway during the summer of 1874, Norwegian students marched in procession to his home to greet him like he was some sort of rock-star.
Ibsen once said: a student has essentially the same task as the poet: to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions which are a stir in the age and in the community to which he belongs. (from Speches and New Letters)
George Bernard Shaw called him the greatest living dramatist in a lecture entitled 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism'.
Ibsen died in Christiania on May 23, 1906. On these disks The Wild Duck (1884), The Lady from the Sea (1888) along with Little Eyolf (1894) are all included.
The final years of Ibsen's life were clouded by mental illness. When We Dead Awaken (1899) and it appears as a radio play here, Ibsen's last dramatic effort, showed the influence of fellow playwright August Strindberg.
The writer James Joyce, who was from his student days a great admirer of Ibsen's work, published a laudatory essay on the play in the 1 April 1900 issue of the Fortnightly Review. It was Joyce's first published piece.
Norwegian playwright, Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. He moved away from the Romantic style, and brought the problems and ideas of the day onto the stage of his time.
This BBC Classics Collection of works by Ibsen is value packed for any theatre lover or student studying literature and drama. It is rare to see his work these days because by today's standards it is very old classic theatre, and maybe a little less than commercial. Many would say his plays are not very engaging. Not dramatic enough - however in his day Ibsen was quite the shocker.
The collection is not limited to stage plays, we hear many radio productions of the great writers work, and these are well worth the energy. Much of Ibsens work is challenging.
One of his best known plays, A Doll's House (1879) was a social drama, which caused a sensation in its day. In the play a woman refuses to obey her husband and walks out from her apparently perfect marriage, her life in the dolls house. This subject and content was a massive departure for the theatre going public. Here was a play dealing with contemporary issues, up close and personal. At the turn-of-the-century physicians used Nora, whose mood changes from joy to depression in short cycles of time, as an example of female hysteria.
Ghosts (1881) touched the forbidden subject of hereditary venereal disease. The London Daily Telegraph called the play an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house wit all its doors and windows open. Judi Dench and Michael Gambon feature in the intense production from 1987. A compelling production.
Peer Gynt (1867) was an epic play intended as a reading drama; not a play to stage, although it has been staged many times very successfully, on this set of dvd's it is included as a radio play; brilliant. The title role of Peer magnificently performed by Ralph Richardson.
In An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen attacked the compact liberal majority and the mass opinion.
Hedda Gabler (1890) was a study of a neurotic woman. Oscar Wilde, after attending the play, wrote: "I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek." Hedda, twenty-nine years old, has married down, is pregnant with an unwanted child, and bored by her husband. Before marriage she has flirted with the drunken poet Loevborg, a portrait of the playwright Strindberg, who hated Ibsen.
He was a very popular man in his time, more or less a celebrity. After spending a couple months in Norway during the summer of 1874, Norwegian students marched in procession to his home to greet him like he was some sort of rock-star.
Ibsen once said: a student has essentially the same task as the poet: to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions which are a stir in the age and in the community to which he belongs. (from Speches and New Letters)
George Bernard Shaw called him the greatest living dramatist in a lecture entitled 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism'.
Ibsen died in Christiania on May 23, 1906. On these disks The Wild Duck (1884), The Lady from the Sea (1888) along with Little Eyolf (1894) are all included.
The final years of Ibsen's life were clouded by mental illness. When We Dead Awaken (1899) and it appears as a radio play here, Ibsen's last dramatic effort, showed the influence of fellow playwright August Strindberg.
The writer James Joyce, who was from his student days a great admirer of Ibsen's work, published a laudatory essay on the play in the 1 April 1900 issue of the Fortnightly Review. It was Joyce's first published piece.
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David Jobling
