Henrik Ibsen biografia, Apuntes de Teatro

¡Descarga Henrik Ibsen biografia y más Apuntes en PDF de Teatro solo en Docsity! HENRIK IBSEN ( 1928-1906) In his own time, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was famous for his scandalous plots, his willingness to handle subjects as controversial as divorce, incest, women's rights and venereal disease. His contemporary Halvdan Koht wrote that Ibsen's plays 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life'; they 'pronounced a death sentence on accepted social ethics'. Today, although his plays remain fiercely polemical, Ibsen is usually venerated as a master psychologist, a writer whose grasp of character interaction makes him the undisputed father of modern drama, the first playwright to explore and expose his protagonists' inner thoughts. Of course, Ibsen retained some old-fashioned devices and ideas. All of his plays have melodramatic elements (the power of scandal, the appeal of fallen women, the return of past lovers, the dramatic potential of secrets and revelations). But, all in all, they embrace the contradictory nature of nineteenth-century Europe. They move the unstable and angst-ridden self to the centre of modern drama. Like Zola, Ibsen attacks the rottenness of bourgeois society. Like Chekhov, he patents a kind of domestic tragicomedy. But arguably, Ibsen's experiments with character and consciousness had a wider influence, even if Zola and Chekhov are now acknowledged to be greater writers. Ibsen purged nineteenth-century theatre of its sentimentality and artificiality. He relieved theatre of its traditional duty to entertain, an aspect of his work which would have a major impact on twentieth-century drama, particularly on the work of Artaud, Brecht and Ionesco. He redefined the notion of tragedy, creating characters with which a modern audience could identify. He also abandoned any conception of good and evil, making all of his protagonists flawed and ambivalent individuals with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he was the least political of writers, protesting that ideals and movements simplified and limited human activity. He wished to dramatize the parts of consciousness that politics could not address or articulate. In 1898, he was asked to speak to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights. He replied: 'I have never written any play to further a social purpose. I have been more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe.' He used politics to examine psychological crisis, not the other way around. Childhood He was born and raised in a small Norwegian coastal town as the oldest of five children. His father was a successful merchant and his mother painted, played the piano and loved to go to the theater. The family was thrown into poverty when Ibsen was 8 because of problems with his father's business and they moved near the town. Many of Ibsen's plays would investigate the effects of poverty on family units. At 15, Ibsen stopped school and went to work as an apprentice in an apothecary, using his limited free time to write poetry and paint. In 1849, he wrote his first play Catilina, a drama written in verse modeled after one of his great influences, William Shakespeare. Early Works Ibsen moved to Christiania (Oslo) to enrol at the University. Living in the capital, one of these friends, Ole Schulerud, paid for the publication of his first play Catilina, which failed to get much notice. The following year, Ibsen had an encounter with the theater manager Ole Bull. He offered him a job as a writer and manager for the Norwegian Theatre in Berge and then he became the assistant stage manager. His duties included composing and producing an original drama each year. Although Ibsen had tried to write before this, it was the discipline of turning out efficient hack work for his employers at the Theatre Company that really taught him how to manipulate an audience, revise material, stimulate actors and generate dramatic interest. The only drawback was that he could not choose his subject-matter. This meant that for fifteen years, Ibsen produced dramatizations of Viking sagas and Norse myths that failed to genuinely fire his imagination. Few critics have bothered to argue for their importance. Ibsen was writing for the theatre, but he wasn't writing as himself. Despite his difficulties, Ibsen found time to write Love's Comedy, a satirical look at marriage, in 1862. His early works were historical and written in verse. Writing in Exile Ibsen left Norway in 1862, eventually settling in Italy for a time. He claimed that he needed this distance to write openly and honestly about Norwegian society. However he was probably also trying to inject a 'European' flavour into his work, so that it would no longer be restricted to parochial themes and obsessions. Between 1866 and 1879, Ibsen produced a wide range of work: Brand, a five-act tragedy about a clergyman whose feverish devotion to his faith costs him his family and ultimately his life in 1865. The play made him famous in Scandinavia. It was a play which was not written in order to be performed but to be read. We can highlight here the strong and original voice of the playwright. Two years later, Ibsen created one of his masterworks, Peer Gynt. A modern take on Greek epics of the past, the verse play follows the title character on a quest. Peer Gynt created a world took out of the Nordic myths and legends. A broadly successful attempt to turn the Norwegian folk hero into an infuriating, irrepressible Everyman. Often this play is seen as an anomaly in the Ibsen canon, because it is disjointed, episodic, mythopoeic and humorous. However, it is one of Ibsen's first attempts to celebrate the rights of the individual, the power of the will, the complexity of love and the perversity of conventional morality. Peer Gynt makes his own way through the society of his time, fighting in wars, building up Empires, seducing women, fathering children and escaping prison. He is sometimes admirable, sometimes deplorable, but 'always himself'. From now on his style changes: In 1868, Ibsen moved to Germany. During his time there, he saw his social drama The Pillars of Society, a vicious attack on capitalism first performed in Munich. The play helped launch his career and was soon followed up by one of his most famous works, A Doll's House = Nora's struggle with the traditional roles of wife and mother and her own need for self-exploration, the marriage is not sacred anymore. For the first time a woman is the main character and is not subordinated to a man like happened before( Ofelia Hamlet, JulietRomeo).. At the end of the play she leaves, telling him: 'you neither think nor talk like the man I could share my life with.' Nora in A Doll's House: 'I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.' This insistance on individualism and a concomitant belief in the difficulty of self-realisation had a massive influence on nineteenth-century culture and society. Around this time, he returned to Rome 1881's Ghosts, made it clear that male hypocrisy and corruption poisoned society in its entirety. It probably caused more uproar than the earlier play, because although Nora's husband was pig-headed, he was in his own way trying to love her. Mr Alving, the dead landowner in Ghosts, not only despises his wife, but infects her progeny with venereal disease. Syphilis was rife in Europe at the time. However, it was not openly acknowledged as a social or political problem. Working from this basis, Ibsen produced another one of his plays about oppression and resistance. Once more, he was able to examine the psychology of incarceration and free-spiritedness. It stirred up even more controversy by tackling such topics as incest and venereal disease. The outcry was so strong that the play wasn't performed widely until two years later.