Ibsen the Pioneer

There are two aspects of the theater: one belongs to the author, the other to the actors. The actors think that it all belongs to the author. The aspect that belongs to the actors they know little or nothing about. Their mistake has grown to such proportions that you cannot give a play to actors anymore, because they do not know. what their contribution is. The curtain goes up and all they know are the lines.

It is not enough.

“Script interpretation” is your profession. What am I? Say, “I am a script interpreter.” It is much better to say that than “I am an actor,” because unless you can interpret a script you are not an actor. The whole point is interpretation. When the playwright has done his job, then it hangs there, and you come along and say, “Well, he’s done it, I’ll take it from him and say his words.” That is not interpretation.

Interpretation means that I am going to find that playwright in me. I am not going to do Ibsen if it’s Chekhov. I am not going to do Strindberg if it’s Shaw. I am not going to do Odets if it’s Wilder. That makes the interpreter.

Vladimir Horowitz once said that American pianists don’t play the piano, they play their technique. There is a similar problem in theater: instead of employing and imposing my technique on the work, I must find out what the playwright wants. How does the playwright affect me as the actor?

In the plays that preceded Ibsen, one always knew who the hero was and could identify with him. It was difficult to do tragedy without the hero and the villain. But Ibsen did something different. Contemporary theater started with Ibsen.

Ibsen changed the world of literature. He opened up drama, which was the most forceful way of making a statement that had to be made. It was time to find a more powerful way, and Ibsen was the one who found it.

You have to understand what he accomplished. There is no important writer after Ibsen who does not use his sense of craft and his ability to analyze the human character. The human character is what you find in Ibsen’s plays.

We are in danger, all of us, and I will give you an example why: I knew a journalist years ago; he was a good journalist. He went around the world and recorded what he saw and came to various conclusions. He said, “Paris is this and London is that—and Greece is worth a couple of days.” He felt that two days was enough to give him an understanding of Greece.

What that statement reveals is that the basis of our Western culture now, and of professional people, is middle-class. The middle class makes statements and knows nothing. You and I are the middle class and must think of ourselves as middle-class. We are middle-class actors, middle-class journalists, middle-class plumbers and morticians.

Henrik Ibsen is Greece for you. Ibsen’s world might as well be Greece, for all you know. It is the world in which the modern theater was born. It produced a form that has lasted longer than the Elizabethan or Restoration or any other form of theater. The Elizabethan style lasted forty to fifty years, no longer. Other styles changed or died out even faster. Ibsen’s formula is the only one that has lasted more than a century.

The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. His formulation goes on and on, stated and restated in creative ways that are profoundly startling. You will be aghast at what is revealed in Ibsen. Every play after him is influenced by him. Miller and Odets and Inge and O’Neill and Williams and Shaw swallowed the whole of him. You cannot escape the influence. Whenever you start a class on a modern playwright, you have to begin with Ibsen because he is the seed. The fertilizer of the egg Like Mozart in music, and the long line of composers who have taken what Mozart the seminal genius did and creatively restated it in a thousand ways.

Ibsen was the pioneer. To our ears, “pioneer” sounds like somebody who climbed in a covered wagon and went West. I think it may be the wrong word, so I will change it: Ibsen was a revolutionary, an anarchist, a nihilist. He broke apart everything in order to get at what he wanted to say. What did he want to say? He wanted to say the truth of what he saw. The truth was difficult to find because until Ibsen came along the forms were romanticized, melodramatized. Too many things “happened” to the truth along the way.

The reaction was violent. The middle-class audience that saw an Ibsen play said, “It’s an open drain—a toilet.” People called it a public obscenity. When you deal with Ibsen, you deal with what the middle class considered indecent, disgusting, sick, amateurish, poisonous. The criticism of him was furious in the middle-class newspapers. But a percentage of that class saw the plays and said, “Well, this is it. We are in for it. Some of the truth of our lives is being revealed to us.” The public was divided and you will be divided, and that is part of what Ibsen wants. When you get so excited about ideas, you are in a new school of playwriting—and you are in for a strong, active, healthy, violent opening up of ideas. Ibsen laughed at what the middle class considered honorable. He attacked the institution of marriage. He was highly skeptical of standard ideals of family and friendship. He said they were all open to discussion.

They said, “Do not open it up.” That is a very middle-class reaction. “So I don’t like my husband. So leave it alone—he’s my husband.” Ibsen’s attacks on values deeply troubled people because his characters and his audiences were the same kind of people. It was not that the audience didn’t understand what he was saying but that they didn’t want to understand. Ibsen kept saying, “You understand—just stop pretending that you don’t.”

Ibsen was lost for fifty years, even on the British. The British are experts on words and literary understanding, but they did not dig him at all. They said, “He’s a degenerate.” It was a devastating put-down because these were intelligent middle-class critics and literary people. “Leave it alone, we don’t want that: We want something comfortable.” But Ibsen kept giving them something uncomfortable.

You get much more class behavior in England than in America. Here we can hardly talk about who we are because we still don’t really know. But if you watch Europeans you know that their behavior will be almost exactly what it was a hundred years ago. A man will kiss your hand or behave in a certain way according to whether he is Swiss, Russian, or Dutch. He behaves in a traditional way because he has not given up class so easily. We have given it up because we’re not sure we ever had it.

If I told you about a family in which an uncle killed his brother and married the brother’s wife, you would be correct to say that it was not a typical middle-class family. It is fine but you don’t quite relate to it. You relate to a lawyer or doctor who owns a house. Lou do not relate to Elsinore and Prince Hamlet. He owns Denmark.

Ibsen wrote about a privileged nineteenth-century class. The audience understood the problems of characters, who—for the first time—were people with the same aims and goals who lived the same lives. They were not special people. They resembled the audience and the audience could identify with them. Their problems belonged to the society—and thus to the audience.

The middle class deserves a beating at every stage of its creation. Ibsen tore into it and in each play revealed a different mountain of problems. Ibsen did not “criticize” the middle class—he annihilated it. He said the middle class is simply not to be believed, what it has done to the human race. He is the prophet who made us understand that we were led down every drain in the world and still are by the institutionalism of the middle class—its politics, religion, morality, family life, economics. We are all surrounded by and part of these institutions.

The middle class resisted this analysis. It still does. Some of the truths that emerge will astound you even though you are living a hundred years later. It is interesting to see how you became yourself. What happened to make you like this?

You must honor your father and mother. You must love your brother. You must love your husband. You must love your wife. Ibsen says all this is nonsense. You do not have to love your husband or your mother, and your mother does not have to love you. It is not your own idea; it was handed down. He attacks all institutions that are handed down—and built up.

In a thousand years, I don’t think we will change. I wanted a divorce but I did not dare divorce until after my mother died. She had divorced but I could not, oh no. We are not as free as we think we are. Ibsen forces you to rethink every aspect of your life—sex, church, morality, money. He said it was all idealized. A great many people have been handed a great many ideals. “My country is the best in the world.” “My family is the best family.” “I am an honest businessman.” It will be a long time until you become a person who really thinks for yourself. But at least Ibsen made it possible for people to say, finally, “My God, I have been trapped in conventional thinking and I don’t know what to do.” You have a big problem. If you give up conventional thinking, where do you go? That is what Ibsen faces you with—and there are not too many places to go.

People do one thing at work and another thing at home, and they are not necessarily the things they think or say they do. Ibsen makes you see that you are a function not of what you say but of what you do—and of what society, in many ways, makes you do.

Playwrights after Ibsen were not considered serious unless they brought in discussion. The play that cannot be argued is not a serious play. The argument concerns ideas that cannot be resolved. But they can be discussed. Until Ibsen, the playwright settled the problems. Ibsen unsettles you. He challenges spectators to think and discuss and—from the discussion—to learn who they really are.

The discussion concerns an issue about which the audience has already formulated an opinion, so they leave the theater arguing their opinions and perhaps continue to do so at home. A playwright who knows how to touch that in an audience is a powerful, successful playwright. These playwrights know that if they can involve you in that way, they have the power to teach you something.

The material thus has to be about moral and social problems that affect the entire audience. An Enemy of the People and Ghosts and Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House concern problems that existed many years ago. Some have been worked out, although I don’t think any of women’s problems have really been “solved”—improved a little, perhaps, but not truly resolved. In any case, Ibsen’s is a technique of getting at both the social truth and the truth of the individual. For the most part, the problem he poses is not unusual or bizarre. It is a problem or moral question familiar to everybody and in need of illumination.

If a young woman wants to leave home and lead her own life but her father says, “You must stay because it is your duty to care for your mother,” who is right? There is serious disagreement about that. Ibsen says that it is abhorrent to sacrifice yourself for another person. That person will not thank you.

You may agree or disagree. Either way, when Ibsen deals with family life, the audience is forced to see the problem as its own. For the first time, theatergoers buy tickets and in return take away an idea that stays with them and that they have to deal with. The play’s meaning is understandable unless you follow the argument in the action and involve yourself in the discussion. Ibsen says that unless the argument is discussed, you cannot find the truth. In an Ibsen play and in every later play, you find the problem discussed in one form or another. Ibsen’s is a teaching theater. He pioneered the idea that the audience—and the actors—must see life as more complex than they think.

The villainous character, for example, is just as conscientious as the heroic one, or—if anything—more so. He is just as “true” and as firm in the belief that he is right. Ibsen says, “In the good there is bad, and in the bad there is good.” There lies a more profound characterization: How can a character be wrong if there is so much right about him? More important (and more interesting) is who the hero and the villain are. Ibsen aims to trap you. He introduces you to a man who is good and you side with him. But in the second act you recognize that he isn’t as good as you thought he was. Ibsen catches you up by making the character both right and wrong. He makes you like or respect something that the discussion may reveal to be hateful and dishonorable. He misleads you so much that, in the end, you are truly uncertain where your opinion lies. Perhaps, then, you go home with some other or ambiguous idea that belongs exclusively to you, to solve it for yourself. Ibsen seldom solves it for you.

The one thing you can hang on to is that an Ibsen play deals with ideas and that they are discussed in front of you. Ibsen changed theater by including this “discussive element” within the play. Discussion was a new concept in drama—something that makes the play both modern and intellectual. It does not necessarily lead anywhere.

Ibsen says that no truth lasts longer than seventeen or eighteen years. There are many truths, and they change. “A wife should obey her husband.” “As a man, I am head of the family.” “As a priest, I represent the church.” Somebody else comes along and says, “I do not know if you are the head of the family. I don’t think you can be the head of anything but yourself. I don’t think anybody can own anybody else or ask anybody else to belong to him” If you have the power to arrest somebody, you can do that, but the audience might say, “I do not think you are arresting him because you are right. I think you just have the power.”

In the discussion, you have to try to distinguish between truths. You listen to all the truths and then make your own choice. Each person is saying honestly what he or she believes to be the truth. There is no “solution.” You cannot “win.” You can only do what you think is right. Truth must be individual for each person—you can only represent yourself. No pastor can represent God. No institution can represent God.

Get the Big Argument in an Ibsen play: the uproar in Enemy of the People when the chairman calls on the doctor to withdraw. He says, “Never.” Never will the majority in the community prevent him from speaking the truth. The majority never has right on its side. Hovstad: “Stupid people are in the absolute overwhelming majority and govern the few who have absorbed new and vigorous truths for the future.”

That illuminates the whole moral-social situation: in the end, none of them will go with the doctor. They can’t take the chance. The paper will go under. The town will go under. There’s no hope if they reveal this sickness. In the end, Dr. Stockmann becomes the person who does it by himself—without the press, without the majority. He finally understands that he has to do it alone. It is the only way in an Ibsenian situation. You want to be an actor? You go out and look for a job. You are going to be defeated. You are not going to get acclaim. You have to fight your way through to becoming what you want to be—according not to somebody else’s standards but to your own. Do you have your own standards? In marriage? In relation to your profession? Are you willing to fight for them?

Ibsen always has two points of view on the stage in his characters. One says, “I believe this,” and the other says, “I believe that.” The audience partakes of and listens to both sides, but there is usually no way to resolve an Ibsen idea.

If you have two opposite opinions and both contain some truth and the audience listens to both, then the one thing you are not going to get anymore is a hero. That is finished. There are no “pure” heroes in literature after Ibsen. Before Ibsen, everybody knew who was good and who was bad, who was right and wrong. We didn’t have to think about it. From Ibsen on, you have to make up your mind as you leave the theater.

Ibsen never says which character is wrong or right. That is absolutely new. Before, everybody could recognize the hero was and the villain. You always knew, right from the beginning: lago is the villain. But Ibsen never says anyone is wrong. The characters all have a right to live, a right to their own way. And if nobody is right, you have no hero.

That is a big change. You cannot play lago anymore as a pure villain. That is no longer a privilege of the modern actor. You are forced to think about everything in terms of the action and the conflict. Because you cannot play “I am the villain,” you are forced to build your character from “I am right.” That is terribly challenging. You have to find the ability to say, “Hitler was right,” if you are going to play that role. You cannot play Hitler as a villain. First of all, he thought he was right. That leaves you without a certain kind of grandeur—that thing of, “I am Lear! I am Hamlet!” It leaves you with, “I am Nora.” “I am Dr. Stockmann.”

The author no longer determines who is right or wrong. The conflict in A Doll’s House is about family life, not personalities. If you are the audience, do not look for a hero or a villain. If you are the actor, be on the side of your character.

This is an enormous advance in theater—not to dictate the solution. After Ibsen, no one wrote a play in which the discussive element was not an important part—understood by playwright, actors, and audience alike. The audience from now on, as Shaw says, is “constantly at a murder trial.”

So the audience has to argue it out, starting in the lobby, and the arguments can get pretty violent in the lobby. A playwright who can do that to an audience is revolutionary.

In fashioning and infusing his plays with this argumentative element, Ibsen created not just a whole new form of drama but—arguably—a new way of life. Something more real or at least more realistic: realism.

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