11 - Ibsen and the twentieth-century stage

Summary

At the outset of his career, as a stage director in Bergen and subsequently in Christiania (now Oslo), Ibsen developed a keen sense of the practicalities and performance conditions of the living theatre that never left him. That intimate knowledge of the stage and its conventions which the playwright derived from these early experiences fostered his extraordinary sensitivity to the poetry of environment in the theatre. In staging his own early saga dramas, he taught himself to write a carefully visualized, highly charged mise-en-sèene into his plays, aimed at concretizing the psychological states and spiritual conditions of the characters, and designed to create a specific mood that would enhance and strengthen the inner action. Costumes, settings, objects, colours, sounds and lighting effects thus remained, from the beginning of his career to its close, the basic syntax of his dramatic poetry. In turn, the intense theatricality inherent in his work has been the source of its continued vitality in performance, long after the specific theatrical conditions for which a given play seems intended have changed irrevocably.