Welcome back to my series where I look
at some of the world's greatest
playwrights. Please do consider
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give this video a thumbs up if you enjoy
it. Today we're looking at the work of
Henrik Ibsen.
I tend to
talk about the work of Ibsen quite a
lot and so I thought it was worth me
getting my Ibsen love-in out of the
way quite early on in this series. There
are many aspects of ibsen's work that we
could focus on. We could look at his use
of architecture and landscape as
semiotic systems, we could look at his
development from writing in poetry to
writing in prose. But what I'd like to focus
on today however is his development of
the problem play. The problem play,
typified by perhaps his most famous
works A Doll's House and An Enemy of the
People, takes as its subject a
contemporary issues and explores it
throughout the play. In the former
example, Ibsen explores the
differences in social consideration
given to men and to women, in the latter
example the collision of scientific fact
and popular opinion. John McGrath rightly
criticises this work, and that of
Ibsen's European contemporaries, for
being too focused on the ins and outs of
middle-class life. This is a fair
criticism but it is not a construction
of Ibsen's or Strindberg's or Shaw's but
is in fact something which they inherit
from Western liberalism as a whole.
Therefore I don't think we can place the
blame for this entirely at their feet. So
I'd like to bracket off that issue for
today. What I'd like to focus on instead
is Ibsen's ability to avoid resolution,
to place the moral scales of his plays in
such a balance that he leaves his
audiences with nothing more than more
questions rather than any fundamental,
structured answers. It is a trait which
many, many writers have tried to emulate
but very few have managed to completely
reproduce since. So I'd like to
focus today on An Enemy of the People, a
play which has very contemporary
resonances.
We've heard the phrase itself invoked on
both sides of the Atlantic to refer to
both the press and the legal system and
therefore I think it's worth examining
today. A quick overview then. Dr.
Stockman is a medical doctor and
scientist who, much like many other
Ibsen characters, seems to also write for
the local newspaper. At the opening of
the play he has just discovered that the
pipes which run water to the local baths
have been contaminated and thus
must be relaid. The local newspaper for
which Dr. Stockmann occasionally
writes is keen to use this particular
expose as the starting point for a
wider expose of corruption in the local
government. The mayor, who also happens to
be Dr. Stockman's brother, is, then, very
keen to see this article doesn't see the
light of day. The main problem is the
fact that the economy of the town in
which they live very much relies on
these baths. To expose this contamination
then would be to put the town's entire
economy in jeopardy. At the midpoint of
the play, the newspaper editors have a
change of heart and turn the town
against Dr. Stockman, thus setting up the
central conceit of this play: the
collision between what Dr. Stockman
knows to be true and what the town wants
to believe is true. The term dialectical
theatre wouldn't come into use until
Bertolt Brecht used it to describe his
own work towards the end of his career.
The concept of the dialectical method
generally was developed by Hegel and it
essentially means that you should first
take one side of an argument, the thesis,
before taking the antithesis, the
opposing side of that argument, before
finally resolving the two in some sort
of synthesis, either a new direction that
that argument could go in or something
completely different altogether. This is
not what Ibsen does. This synthesis is
very much present in the work of Brecht
but also in the State of the Nation
plays of David Edgar and the like and
essentially tends to mean the moral
message that we go home with after
having watched the play. However the
problem plays of Ibsen emphatically
refuse such a resolution. During Act Two,
Dr. Stockman is extolling the virtues of
liberal democracy. As his fellow citizens
agree with him he is very much in favour of
the idea of popular democracy. This
very much represents the thesis of the
play. The antithesis then comes when the
newspaper editors turn the town
against Dr. Stockman and suddenly his
thoughts towards democracy and this anti
fact populism which seems to be growing
around him are less than positive. Now,
the Brechtian or Hegelian response to
this would be, at the end of the play, to
synthesize these two arguments to
perhaps present a different way of
making decisions based neither on the
science of experts nor on the popular
decision making of the populace. What
Ibsen does, however, is to present these
two ideals as fundamentally
irreconcilable. It is impossible for the
idea of democracy and technocracy to live
purely alongside each other. Ultimately,
this leaves us, the audience, with a
sense of irresolution at the end of the
play, in doing so deferring the synthesis
element of Hegel's method on to us. In
doing so, Ibsen manages to throw open a
debate whilst avoiding making any broad
moralistic, propagandist arguments. I
believe we can see a similar notion in A
Doll's House. While in a contemporary
reading it might be tempting to cast Torvald
in the role of the villain of the
piece, I believe that Torvald
comes across, more often than not, as a
weak man whose opinions and viewpoints
particularly towards women are defined
as much by the society which exists
around him as from his own personal
beliefs. Watching the play today, it seems
like nothing more than common sense that
Nora should leave at the end of it, yet
I think with only applying a very
minor bit of moral relativism we can see
why the play might have been more
controversial back in the late 19th
century. In both these plays, then, Ibsen
sheds light on a very contemporary issue
of his time, both of which happened to be
quite contemporary now too, without
forcing the point of view of his own
upon us. It's something that many writers
of all forms have tried to replicate
since but which very few have truly
succeeded in and certainly something I
think we could all take a slice of
advice from in writing our own work.
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