When the National Theatre in Oslo opened its 1988 fall season in September, it featured two Ibsen plays: Ghosts and Hedda Gabler. In itself his was not so remarkable, for Henrik Ibsen has been something of a Norwegian national institution since well before the National Theatre was founded. His statue in bronze stood outside the theater doors when they were first opened to the public, in September 1899, and one of his plays, An Enemy of the People, was among the first to be performed on its stage. Ghosts and Hedda Gabler have been regularly in the repertoire ever since.
What was remarkable was the question that boldly headed the 1988 theater program--Lever Ibsen? (Is Ibsen Alive?)--and the answer theoretically provided by the program notes and practically by the performances. The notes told us that the directors had seized on the notion of Ibsen as the courageous dramatizer of the unspeakable: "forbidden love, sexually transmitted diseases, adultery, incest, drunkenness, fornication, and lies." The set told us, even at a glance, that Ibsen had been brought "alive" through the visual idiom of the modern theater. Instead of the traditional garden room, with its sofas and fringed tablecloths, the stage was set for Ghosts, as for a production of Ionesco's The Chairs, with no furniture other than rows upon rows of chairs between which the actors had to negotiate their movements. Undistracted by the minutiae of nineteenth century interior decoration, the stage image signaled a world of oppressive institutions, a lack of moral space for individuals. Ghosts, it was suggested, can leap across time and space; Ibsen is "alive" in the age of AIDS.
Had the Oslo directors but known it, a rather less blatant answer to their question was being prepared in London, where during the fall of 1988 audiences were to flock to the young Vic Theatre to see Arthur Miller's version of An Enemy of the People. It has been more than a hundred years since Ibsen wrote this play about polluted bathwater in a small Norwegian fjord town; yet the response to it at the Young Vic (an aptly ironic name for the theater in this context) suggests that it is mightily alive in a neo-Victorian Thatcherite present. What happens, people have been made to ask, when a stubbornly truth-loving individual, such as is Dr. Stockmann in this play, comes up against a moral majority that has behind it the coercive and persuasive forces of bureaucracy, censorship, and the profit motive? It is not that the director has labored especially hard for "relevance"--that will-o'-the-wisp that has led so many productions astray--but that social history has an uncanny way of repeating itself: Even as the success of An Enemy of the People led to its transfer from a "fringe" to a West End theater (the equivalent of moving from "off" to Broadway), a junior minister of health, a female Dr. Stockmann, was forced to resign because she had drawn attention to the incidence of salmonella poisoning from British eggs and so caused the egg-producing industry to lose millions of pounds.
What the British public also loved about both Dr. Stockmann--Ibsen's and the real-life version--was the sheer emotional mess of their situations. Critics call it ambivalence. Ibsen's own catchword was tvertimot (on the contrary), which means that he was good at deconstructing himself and, translated into dramatic terms, making the idealist's situation both heroic and comic. Dr. Stockmann is as much an antihero as a hero. In the closing moments of the play, as he stands thrown by the town-people, his self-assurance is exuberant: "Now am I one of the strongest men in the whole world….The fact is,
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