Henrik Ibsen, Six Plays ****

When I made a tour of Norwegian literature last summer, I omitted its biggest name, Henrik Ibsen. He wrote plays rather than novels, and I felt like I should see stage productions instead of reading them.

One of the books I read, Dag Solstad's Shyness and Dignity, featured a high-school teacher who has an epiphany while teaching Ibsen's The Wild Duck to a roomful of bored students. I shopped around for a collection of Ibsen plays that included A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. I found a used copy of a leather-bound Franklin Mint edition with these two plays plus Ghosts and Hedda Gabler.

A Doll's House is Ibsen's most popular play. Like most of his plays, it was controversial: it ends with a woman leaving her husband and children, unthinkable at the time. I enjoyed the play and appreciated Nora's courage of conviction, although I'm not sure her behavior in the early acts is consistent with her final decision. She is clearly acting the part of a supportive wife but seems a bit insecure even in private moments.

Ghosts feels like it goes out of its way to be controversial, with its explicit exploitation of servants and congenital syphilis. The major theme is the passing of trauma from one generation to the next.

The Wild Duck has a more sophisticated structure than the previous plays, and a more sophisticated message ("Rob the average man of his basic lie and you rob him of his happiness as well"). In the earlier plays, the truth or "Claim of the Ideal" is an unqualified good; The Wild Duck recognizes the value of self-delusion. My complaint about the play is that its setting includes an implausible attic in which people can go hunting.

Hedda Gabler features a manipulative title character that actresses surely love to play. By this point in Ibsen's development, the repressed woman has figured out how to use her position to her advantage. She gets her comeuppance in the end, so I imagine this play was less controversial.

These four plays from Ibsen's middle period find their characters pushing against social pressures. They share common elements such as unhappy marriages, knocked-up servants married off to other men, and principled suicides. After finishing them, I decided to add a couple of Ibsen's later works, Rosmersholm and The Master Builder. In these plays, the characters push against their own inner conflicts.

Rosmersholm tells the story of a landowner and pastor who has lost his faith and shifted his sympathies to the Radicals. He argues about this change with his conservative brother-in-law and with the editor of the Radical paper, and discusses its consequences with the young woman who led him to his new viewpoint. Almost nothing happens in this play beyond conversations and a few principled suicides at the beginning and end. I think its subtle messages would be better conveyed in a novel.

The Master Builder has a bullying title character who is afraid of losing his power to "the next generation." Like Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, it has a young female character demonstrating her power from within the confines of her social role. The final act has several reverses to our interpretation of the master builder's motivations. 

All six plays have something to recommend them. Dramatically, the best are A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder. Thematically, the most interesting are The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm.