Henrik Ibsen

In the 19th century, the playwright Henrik Ibsen completely rewrote the rules of drama by introducing a form of realism that we still see in theatres today. He turned the European stage away from what it had become – a plaything and distraction for the bored – and introduced a new type of moral analysis.

Ibsen brought his audience into ordinary people’s drawing rooms, where the bourgeois kept their carefully guarded secrets. He then pitted the conflicts that arose from challenging assumptions and direct confrontations against a very realistic middle-class background and developed his plays with piercing dialogue and meticulous attention to detail.

For this, he has earned his place in history. Ibsen is undoubtedly one of the greatest playwrights in the universe. So naturally, The International Astronomical Union named a planet after him. Only a minor planet, but still!

Henrik Ibsen’s major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, and A Doll’s House, as well as Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, and The Master Builder. All of these plays have strong and challenging characters that live on in the audience's imagine outside of their plays’ intrigues.

A Doll’s House is perhaps the most-staged of Ibsen's plays. The third act culminates in the character of Nora leaving her husband Torvald and her three children – unheard of in 1879, when it was first performed, and still one of the most famous gender political moments in world literature. The role of Nora even holds an iconic status: Unesco’s Memory of the World register calls Nora “a symbol throughout the world, for women fighting for liberation and equality”.

According to Norwegian actor Dennis Storhøi, who has played the character of Peer Gynt numerous times, Ibsen is a genius thanks to the way in which he captures the psychology and behaviour of his male and female characters perfectly at all times.

“He must have had significant insight into how peoples’ weaknesses and strengths worked,” he says in the video below.

Other iconic playwrights and novelists, including James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Eugene O'Neill, were greatly inspired by Ibsen. The Austrian composer Gustav Mahler thought so highly of Ibsen that he didn’t even dare approach the writer when he spotted him sitting at a neighbouring table at the Grand Hotel in Oslo.

Today, there is almost always an Ibsen play being performed somewhere in Norway. Some theatres, like the National Theatre in Oslo, subtitles some of its plays in English. Others, like the fantastic outdoor play at the Peer Gynt Festival at Gålå in Gudbrandsdalen, accommodates its international audience through introductions, summary booklets, and audio guides. But if you really want to experience Ibsen’s plays like they were meant to, you need to do like James Joyce did – learn Norwegian!