1st Edition

Global Ibsen Performing Multiple Modernities

    292 Pages
    by Routledge

    304 Pages
    by Routledge

    Ibsen’s plays rank among those most frequently performed world-wide, rivaled only by Brecht, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and the Greek tragedies. By the time Ibsen died in 1906, his plays had already conquered the theaters of the Western world. Inviting rapturous praise as well as fierce controversy, they were performed in Europe, North America, and Australia, contributing greatly to the theater, culture, and social life of these continents. Soon after Ibsen’s death, his plays entered the stages of East Asia - Japan, China, Korea - as well as Africa and Latin America. . But while there exist countless studies on Ibsen the dramatist and the significance of his plays within different cultures written mainly by literary scholars, none of them examine the ways in which Ibsen's plays were performed, or the impact of such performances on the theater, social life, and politics of these cultures. In Global Ibsen, contributors look at the way performances of Ibsen's plays address problems typical to modern societies all over the world, including: the inferior social status of women, the decay of bourgeois family life and values, religious fundamentalism, industrial pollution and corporate cover-up, and/or the loss of and search for identity.

    Introduction  Erika Fischer-Lichte  I. What Happened to the Women’s Liberation Movement? – A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler on stage  1.  Ibsen on the Platteland: The first professional production of A Doll’s House in Afrikaans goes on tour  Temple Hauptfleisch and Hilda van Lill  2. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in America  Marvin Carlson 3.  A Doll’s House in the Antipodes  Jacqueline Martin  4. Canajun-eh? Finding a house for Nora in Canada  Errol Durbach  5. Women’s issues and theater style: A Doll’s House in Japan  Mitsuya Mori  6. Against love - Nora and Hedda on the contemporary Scandinavian stage  Tiina Rosenberg  7. Deborah Warner directs Hedda Gabler: Mercurial Pistols  Maria Shevtsova  II. Performing Peer Gynt – Negotiating Cultural Identity  8. Peer Gynt at the pyramids of Giza  Nehad Selaiha  9. Peer Gynt in Israel: A national hero returning from exile?  Freddie Rokem   10. Antunes Filho’s Peer Gynt - A remarkable production of Ibsen in Brazil  Thereza Menezes 11. Patrice Chéreau’s Peer Gynt: A renewed reception of Ibsen’s theater in France   Catherine Naugrette  12. Werner Egk’s Peer Gynt in Berlin 1938 - opera and politics  Clemens Risi  III. Modernization of Society and the Emergence of a New Theatre  13. Ghosts and gods: Ibsen, tragic actors and modern tragedies in contemporary Greek theater practice  Platon Mavromoustakos  14. An Enemy of the People - the play that anticipates the future  Wang Ning  15. An Enemy of the People as a ‘Trojan Horse’ - Frank Castorf stages Ibsen in the German Democratic Republic 1988  Barbara Gronau  16. Rosmersholm in the Moscow Art Theater (1908) and it’s First Studio (1918)  Dmitry Trubotchkin  17.  Eleonora Duse and Gordon Craig’s lost Ibsen  Laura Caretti

    Biography

    Erika Fischer-Lichte is professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universitaet Berlin and Chair of the Institute for Advanced Studies on "Interweaving Cultures in Performance" founded in 2008. From 1995 to 1999 she was President of the International Federation for Theatre Research and member of the Academia Europaea, the Academy of Sciences at Goettingen, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

    Barbara Gronau is a lecturer at the Institute for Theatre Studies at the Freie Universitaet Berlin and a postdoctoral member of the Interdisciplinary Research Center "Performing Culture".

    Christel Weiler is currently Program Manager and Associate Director of the International Research Center "Interweaving Performance Cultures". Her previous publication includes "Intercultural exchange in the Theatre", and numerous articles on contemporary theatre, "Performance Analysis. An Introduction" (to be published in 2010).

     

     

     

    ‘As the first global collection dedicated to the study of multiple plays by Ibsen in performance, it offers fascinating new insights into this world dramatism.’ - Julie Holledge, Ibsen Studies Journal