A Doll’s House by Henrick Ibsen
A Doll’s House by Henrick Ibsen
This is the first time that I write a second “review” for the same book. It happened because I have listened to the play again this morning, it is a different production and I have had some issues with Ibsen.
His plays have not been very well understood by me, since critics appreciate them highly and I didn’t, so I figured take another shot.
A Doll’s House is very good, and I knew that from the last reading. But it just happened that I have read about Ibsen, in the great Intellectuals by Paul Johnson, which brought a few acclaimed writers and philosophers to my attention.
They are painted in a very gloomy, if accurate light. Ibsen comes across a little better than some of the other “role models” – Hemingway, Tolstoy, Rousseau…most of them share some obnoxious traits- Rousseau, Tolstoy, Marx and Ibsen have refused to recognize children born to them, behaved abominably with family members. Ibsen, after he got rich and famous refused to support family members, some of whom would die in misery.
But this does not change the fact that The Doll’s House is a masterpiece. I had feared that, knowing distasteful details about the author would cause some kind of nausea- look at the high moral ground preached and the things he did in real life.
Fortunately, I did not go through that. The high quality of the production helped. Sir Ian McKellen plays the role of Torvald.
The moral issues at stake are very poignant and the heroine gains the audience’s sympathy for her plight. I wish I had a wife that would go to such extremes of hardship for me. But then the play is making one ask:
- Do I play the role of a Torvald in my household?
- Perhaps I should go more to acknowledge what my spouse does and I barely notice
- True, she made me take in about ten creatures (I was ok with about half) but she cares for all
The complexity of the play makes me wonder if the fact that Ibsen seemed to be a terrible man at times did not help after all.
Perhaps a writer should be a lout, at least often enough to understand the intricacies of the positive as well as negative characters. The writer could not be a serene angel, floating high above, without any real knowledge of what is going on in the human realm.
And besides, even the pure have their low moments…Jesus had his moments of doubt, if I am not mistaken and having reached the highest peaks of human understanding, creators cannot help but sink to some frightening lows…
How could Ibsen write about Torvald, without being familiar with him, being something of a Torvald at times? I am surprised to read that A Doll’s House was the most performed play in the world in 2006.
Many of the great works of the world are available, free of charge on the Gutenberg site. More than half the top 100 best books ever written, from the list compiled by scholars and writers and available on the Guardian – are available in the “Public Domain”.
We are talking about books that are sometimes thousands of years old: The Odyssey, The Iliad, Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, The Arabian Nights (or the 1,001 nights in languages other than English) and in the other cases the books are hundreds of years or old enough to be out of copyright protection- their original versions, not the latest publication of one printing house or another…
Pride and Prejudice, the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert and a good many more.
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