Some came fresh to the play, or indeed to Ibsen himself – others were rediscovering a work they had read at an earlier stage in life, whether for study or pleasure.
Myriam mentioned that she had felt a bit fearful of Ibsen’s reputation for high-flown gloom, and was relieved to find the play snappier than she had supposed.
Maren brought up the interesting issue of reading a play – especially, as Myriam pointed out, one as “well-made” (structured to begin as shortly before the climax as possible, with minimal descriptive background) as this one. Doesn’t the reader miss the dimensionality of a novel’s prose, getting only the bare bones of the action? Unless one is reading as a potential actor in or director of the play, isn’t one likely to miss the richness that acting and staging bring to the text?
Maren also noted the distinctively nineteenth-century framework of the action, which determined the characters’ social possibilities and limitations – she found this factor distancing, rather than intriguing. This made a nice segue to Emma-Jane’s re-reading of the play, which left her debating again how much Hedda was a villain and how much a victim.
I hadn’t remembered how funny the play could be, and several people agreed heartily – Tesman’s slippers and Judge Brack got special mention here. On that point, I’d like to attach the link to a series of Ibsen parodies in Punch:
Happy Holidays to All!
Phoebe
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