Impact of Ibsen on Modern Theatre

1. Impact of Ibsen on Modern Theatre

2. The first ‘modern’ playwright to use theatre as a forum to explore the formative forces of modern life • He stimulated new modes of acting and staging • He has been a profound influence on major playwrights of the twentieth century • His plays are still ‘well-made’ with well-constructed plots, a compact timeline, full of exposition

3. But now exposition requires the characters to explore themselves • Plays no longer staged solely for entertainment and therefore actors no longer need to ingratiate themselves with the audience • Characters become complex and reveal their personalities through memory and symbols. • So Ibsen is asking for a more imaginative, active effort from his audience

4. Staging must become more precise: because interaction between character and environment is a crucial dimension of his drama • The theatre artist who benefited most from Ibsen’s plays was the actor: his plays require compelling quality in the acting. He regarded the actors as ‘fellow-creators’.

5. Henry James on Ibsen: • He will remain intensely dear to the actor and the actress. He cuts them out work to which the artistic nature in them joyously responds – work difficult and interesting, full of stuff and opportunity. The opportunity that he gives them is almost always to do the deep and delicate thing – the sort of chance that, in proportion as they are intelligent, they are most on the lookout for. He asks them to paint with a fine brush; for the subject he gives them over is our plastic humanity.

6. He does not create types but characters in minute and elaborate detail. This requires a new style, a new approach to creating a role (consider Nora or Torvald or Krogstad)

7. Alfred Kerr on Ibsen: • The best and most momentous things that Ibsen has given us are the impulse to truth in an artistically untruthful time; the impulse to seriousness in an artistically superficial time; the pleasure of agitation in a time of stagnation; and the courage to grasp whatever contains something human, wherever it grows. • Kerr saw him as the ‘grandfather’ of the modern theatre