The Modern Era I: Introductory, Ibsen & Strindberg

Cooperation between the arts: Edvard Munch design for Ibsen's Ghosts

During the period around the turn of the twentieth century, a major shift occurred throughout global culture, politics, and society. Something fundamental was changing radically all over the world.  Paris remained the cultural center in the West, but in cities such as Berlin, Munich and Vienna, as well as Saint Petersburg in Russia, similar non-traditional artistic movements developed, mirroring their times. In his excellent book on Paris at the turn of the century, The Banquet Years (New York: Vintage Books 1968), Roger Shattuck describes a time of exuberant, riotous adventure and experiment, shadowed by anti-Semitism, anarchists and increasingly unstable governments. Much of the new art seemed a reaction to a world order that seemed no longer able to work.

Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, the relatively small rebellions that peppered the nineteenth century turned into revolution. The most vivid illustration was the Great War, later known as World War I.   Historian Barbara Tuchman, writing about this “war to end all wars,” described sparkling, red-clad cavalry troops as excellent targets for the dull black guns that methodically blew the horsemen off the face of the earth.”  (Guns of August, New York: Ballantine Books reprint 1994)  In a more recent account of the First World War, author John Keegan asserted that it was an unnecessary and tragic conflict (The First World War, New York: Vintage Books, 2000); unnecessary in that the chain of events that led to its outbreak could have been stopped before it began; tragic in that it destroyed 10 million human beings.  Keegan points out that when the Second World War came in 1939, it was far worse than World War I, but it was unquestionably the outcome of the first, and when it finally broke out the knowledge that it would come was appallingly clear.  In 1914, however, the war came as an enormous shock to Europeans, many of whom had never dreamt such a nightmare could occur.    

The new order that developed from late nineteenth century continuing into the beginning of World War I, is labeled “modern,” a difficult word to define.  Earlier dominant trends in the arts, Neoclassicism, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, Realism, are relatively clear and useful terms.  The “modern” is so vague a concept, proceeding from as well as breaking away from traditions often at odds with each other, that it may be better to describe the particular people and their work that were categorized as modern, than to attempt a specific definition.

      

To begin, let’s look at slides of two paintings and allow pictures to say a thousand words.  The first (Renoir, “The Bathers,” painted in the impressionist style during the 1890s) was a very trendy way to look at women (the garden, the world) in the very late nineteenth century. The second (Picasso, “The Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907) is how one painter at least began to see women, and the world, less than 20 years later!  Obviously, something major had begun to happen; something radical, fundamental, was changing throughout the west.  
  

      

Theatre, as well as other art, reflects the radical shift in culture, and in the next weeks we’re going to uncover sea changes in the theatrical form.  In order to show you this transformation, I’ll be handing you pieces of a patchwork quilt that you’ll have to stitch together.

      

Probably the best – really the ONLY – place to begin is in Norway, where a writer who bears the onerous title “the father of modern drama” was born.  Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) towers above all other dramatic authors of his age.  

Michael Meyer, Ibsen’s definitive English biographer, has explained how unusual, surprising, almost unheard of was the rise of this author.  After all, he was Norwegian.  Throughout cultured Europe no one knew the language, no one knew many if any Norwegian writers before Ibsen, and yet he was named “the father!” It was as if, Meyer suggests, theatre today would be revolutionized by an Eskimo!   

      

Ibsen passed through three major phases in his writing.  His first great plays were romantic verse dramas, whose tortured heroes were the title characters of the plays:  Peer Gynt (1867) and Brand (1866). In the first, a man avoids issues by skirting them; in the second, a man is so sure of his own vision that he sacrifices everything to it.

      

Ibsen soon moved towards the realistic style, reading and making use of the Frenchman Scribe’s well-made play formula, but placing great importance on character as well as on plot, and focusing on new themes, no matter how 

shocking, even revolting the subject matter.  A Doll’s House (1879) is a fine example.  Similar to a play by Scribe or Sardou, it could have been called The Unopened Letter, given all the suspense Ibsen created when Nora tries to keep Torvald from reading his mail.  But Ibsen was going for more than just a well-made suspense drama. The characters are highly developed. There are no cardboard good and bad guys; and whereas Scribe would have built at least as much suspense but wrapped up the story happily, Ibsen had Nora do the unthinkable; walk out the door. And the slam was heard round the world.

      

A Doll’s House made Ibsen famous internationally, and he went further into the new realism he created with Ghosts (1881), probably the most influential work of Ibsen’s realistic

period.  In it, Mrs. Alving has been trying to protect her artist son from the truth about his dead father, who had seemed a pillar of society, but who secretly had affairs with whomever he could, including the family’s own maid.  By the maid Alving had a daughter, now an attractive young woman serving Mrs Alving…as a maid!  In the first act of the play, Mrs Alving’s son Oswald, just returned from a Bohemian life in Paris, begins to flirt with the maid, and as they laugh and kiss (step-brother and sister!) at the end of the act, Mrs Alving stares at the audience and whispers the word: “Ghosts!” in one of the great act endings in modern theatre. 

To make matters even worse, Mr. Alving is long dead, but had contracted syphilis and passed it on genetically to his son.  As the secrets come out in Ibsen’s intricate plot, Oswald is beginning to go mad from the effects of the sins of his father – “the sins of the father are visited upon the son” – and at one point he begs his mother to administer the drug which will kill him as he succumbs to the disease.  The final curtain falls with Oswald, now victim to syphilis, incoherently babbling “The sun!  The sun!” and his mother holding the drug, unable to decide if she can indeed administer it!

Another socially conscious, realistic play of Ibsen's
with the great Ian McKellen in the title role

The shocking subject matter of Ghosts – one didn’t dare breathe the word “syphilis” in polite society, much less write a play about it – attracted the new, small theatres springing up throughout Europe as much as it repulsed the mainstream public and press. Some comments from journalists of the day about Ghosts:

    “one of the filthiest things ever written in Scandinavia!”

    “an open drain”

    “a loathsome sore unbandaged”

    “a dirty act done publicly”

Whatever they thought, with plays like Ghosts and A Doll’s House, Ibsen made the theatre, after 100 years of melodrama and burletta, an accepted medium for the most serious and profound writing.

      

Ibsen’s later writing did not lose the social awareness of his realistic phase, but his late plays moved strongly towards 

symbolism. Indeed, in Ibsen’s work there was always a strong use of symbols. As early as A Doll’s House, the very title is a symbol, and 1884, in The Wild Duck, the symbol takes on more power still. In Hedda Gabler, the situation remains relatively realistic, but Ibsen manipulates the language so that nearly every conversation exists on both realistic and symbolic levels, especially the conversations between Lovborg and Hedda, and Hedda and Brack.  When Hedda (speaking to herself at this point) is burning Lovborg’s manuscript, she’s symbolically burning his and Thea’s “child!”

      

Elizabeth Marvel in the New York Theatre Workshop production

Ibsen wrote most of his plays in self-imposed exile from Norway.  For 27 years (with infrequent and brief returns home) he lived in European cities, among them Rome, Dresden and Munich. When he returned (in his 60s) to Norway, his plays began to take on a more mystical, religious, poetic nature.  Probably the greatest play of this period is The Master Builder (1892).  Solness is an architect in late middle

Terrific tv production of The Master Builder 1988
Miranda Richardson as Hilda, Leo McKern
as Solness

age, and he fears the punishment of God for his past sins.  He is certain that the punishment will take the form of younger architects pounding at his door, so to speak, bringing with them newer, better work than his. As he complains of this possibility, there is indeed a pounding at the door, but when he opens it, instead of younger competition, enter Hilda Wangel, a beautiful young woman. She explains that when she was a child she saw Solness climb 

high up the spire of a church he had just completed, and hang a wreath atop it.  He remembers too, and says, “Yes, and when I looked down someone was wildly waving a kerchief -- it made me dizzy and I nearly fell!”  Hilda says, “That someone was me!”  She goes on to remind him that afterwards he’d been invited to her parents house, and that when there, he and she spent some time alone together.  She claims he sat her on his knee, kissed her hard, on the lips -- Solness, 

Hilda with Solness's long-suffering wife, played
brilliantly by Jane Lapotaire

flustered, remembers nothing of this.  Hilda gets angry and reminds him that after the kiss he promised her that in ten years he would come for her and that they would run off and build “castles in the air.”  She waited, ten years passed, he did not return for her, so she came to him! Even though Solness remembers none of this, he is totally dazzled by this young woman.  To keep a 

Hilda wildly waving the kerchief - Miranda Richardson
was as frightening as she was beautiful in this role

long and complicated story very short, Solness has built a tower on his new home.  Hilda urges him to climb again, and to hang a wreath at the top of the tower. Solness knows that he has no business doing such a thing, but she insists, he does, when he’s at the top she again shouts out and waves a handkerchief. Dizzied, he plunges to his death, as Hilda watches...she has been the danger at his door, the avenging angel, all along.

Another difficult but powerful late Ibsen is
John Gabriel Borkman, shown above in a 20th century
production, below in the 21st century, only a few years
ago - Ibsen attracts the greatest actors of any given age

Robert Brustein (in his excellent study of modern drama, The Theatre of Revolt, 1964) called The Master Builder “A great cathedral of a play, with dark mystical strains which boom like the chords of an organ.”  Symbols dominate the action in this and Ibsen’s other late plays.  Ibsen predates and is a major influence on the symbolist movement.  We’ll speak of this movement later, but symbolism tends to give ordinary objects significance far beyond their literal meaning, and thus enlarges the scope of the dramatic action.

      

Ibsen’s writing breaks down into three phases, but is perhaps better viewed as variations on the same theme: rebellious heroes struggling for integrity, and the great conflict of duty to oneself versus duty to others.  Ibsen said, “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”  He stated: “Before I write one word, I must know the character through and through; I must penetrate to the last wrinkle of his soul -- then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.” But though he wrote some of the great realistic drama, and dealt with what many people saw as sordid, forbidden subjects, he compared his writing to the naturalistic movement, of which he did not approve:  “Zola,” he said, goes to bathe in the sewer. I go to cleanse it.”  

      

Ibsen is indeed the father of modern drama, but he had three close relatives, so to speak, in Chekhov, Shaw, and 

Strindberg.  These four are generally agreed to be the greatest writers at the beginnings of modern drama, and their plays continue to be produced today. We’ll look at all of these important writers in some detail before we look at other aspects of the modern theatre, but first let’s travel the shortest distance from Ibsen’s Norway -- to Sweden -- and examine the interesting case of August Strindberg.

“Strindberg, says Robert Brustein, “writes himself, and the self he continually exposes is that of alienated modern man, crawl-ing between heaven and earth, desperately trying to pluck some absolute from a forsaken universe.”

Like Ibsen, Strindberg began writing romantic sagas, but his first great writings are in the realistic mode, the most important The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888).  The Father tells of the struggle between a husband and wife.  He’s a strong confident captain at the beginning of the play, sure of himself until he is given to believe that he is not the father of his daughter.  Is it all in his mind?  Is his wife deliberately taunting him with the possibility?  Is it true? Whatever the truth, his confidence deteriorates, and he descends into madness.  After he has nearly shot his daughter and turns the gun on himself, only to find that it has been unloaded, his old nanny gently tricks him into putting on a straight jacket, and the father lies on the floor trying hopelessly to yank himself free, as his wife stands over him -- now SHE has the power.

   

Although The Father is set in a drawing room, the play’s setting, says Robert Brustein, “is less a bourgeois household than an African jungle, where two wild animals, eyeing each other’s jugular, mercilessly claw at each other until one of them falls.”  More than any dramatist before him, Strindberg bares his soul on stage, and the chief burden of his soul is the struggle between man and woman. 

      

This struggle, demonstrated in The Father, is further explored in Miss Julie.  In this play, a servant, Jean, seduces his mistress Julie (or does she seduce him?) during Midsummer Eve festivities.  Then, when he begins to fear that their impossible union will be found out, he induces her to, or at least doesn’t stop her from, cutting her throat.  The dramatic design of Miss Julie is like two intersecting lines moving in opposite directions:  Jean reaches up, Julie falls down.  Strindberg wrote this powerful play in a mere two weeks!

The best production I ever saw of Miss Julie - in Swedish without supertitles

      

There is a strong basis for this theme of the struggle between man and woman in Strindberg’s own life. Remember, Strindberg writes himself.  Strindberg adored his mother with a passion he described as “an incest of the soul,” but he hated her as well.  This love-hate relationship was reflected in his relationships with his three wives. Strindberg wooed his first while she was married to another.  He worshipped her, helped her to get a stage career, overwhelmed her, in fact. After which she divorced her husband and married Strindberg. As soon as they were married he began to accuse her of competitiveness, lesbianism, drunkenness, infidelity, uncleanliness, doubting his sanity -- and not keeping the accounts!

      

He divorced his first wife, quickly married Frida Uhl, and the same pattern repeated itself.  Two years later he was separated again.  His last marriage was to Harriet Bosse, an actress 30 years younger than he. In an angry letter to this wife, Strindberg wrote:  “The day after we wed, you decided that I was not a man.  A week later you were eager to let the world know that you were not yet the wife of August Strindberg, and that your sisters considered you ‘unmarried’ ...we did have a child together, didn’t we?”

   

In the Road to Damascus, Strindberg poetically summed up his relationships with women, rather poetically, but offers insight into what he at least saw as the basic struggle between the sexes:

In woman I sought an angel, who could lend me wings, and I fell into the arms of an earth-spirit, who suffocated me under mattresses stuffed with feathers of wings!  I sought an Ariel and I found a Caliban; when I wanted to rise she dragged me down; and continually reminded me of the fall...

In the mid 1890s, after his second divorce, Strindberg fell into a mental crisis, living for a time like a derelict in Paris.  During this time Strindberg kept a diary, later published as 

the Inferno -- an apt title!  Nearly five years later, after coming through the crisis, he began writing plays again, but 

for the most part they were vastly different from his earlier, naturalist work. Strindberg had undergone a sea change, and this change was reflected in his work.  He called the new plays “dream plays” in which reality was re-shaped, time and place was frequently illogically shifted, and the real and imaginary were merged.  He wrote of alienated people lost in an incomprehensible universe.  The best known of these are The Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), plays that predated the expressionist movement in drama, and strongly influenced that form and much other twentieth century theatre.