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Theater critics aren't always the savviest harbingers of revolution -- nor, for that matter, its most ardent advocates. Even so, it is startling to note the contumely that greeted the premieres of many of Henrik Ibsen's most enduring works. As recounted in Michael Meyer's 1967 biography, Ibsen, the German critics were cool to A Doll's House, the British press denounced Ghosts as a "mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity," and nearly everyone regarded Hedda Gabler as a failure, largely because of the very moral complexity that now intrigues us.
Today Ibsen's wedding of tragedy to the ethical dilemmas and unadorned rhetoric of middle-class characters seems like the necessary prelude to modern drama, from George Bernard Shaw to Arthur Miller. Within his stuffed Victorian living rooms, the Norwegian playwright championed free-thinking, if flawed, heroes over both the conformist masses and self-aggrandizing authorities. His signature metaphors of corruption and contagion -- along with the violent undertow in his works, informed by the upheavals of 19th- century Europe -- retain their relevance. The fateful door-slamming in A Doll's House, the shattered glass in An Enemy of the People, and the climactic gunshots in Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck are staples of our theatrical vocabulary. Ibsen has become, as W.H. Auden might say, a whole climate of opinion about the possibilities and the limits of realistic prose drama -- though the dramatist himself, more protean than his legacy, was also a poet and a symbolist.
According to Meyer, Ibsen (1828-1906) was a prickly, obsessive character, estranged from most of his family, his small hometown of Skien, and, for many years, Norway itself. He remained haunted by his father's financial failure -- a theme that turns up frequently in his plays -- and later fathered an illegitimate child, an event that also provided dramatic fodder. (Meyer claims that Ibsen had doubts about his own paternity as well.) After the embittering experience of directing financially struggling theaters in Bergen and Christiania (now Oslo) and the poor reception afforded his early works, he lived for 27 years in Germany and Italy. His first real success was Brand, an 1866 poetic drama that the translator Geoffrey Hill calls "a tragic farce."
Ibsen returned to Norway to live in 1891, when...