The Arts: While some countries struggle to relate to their cultural heavyweights, Norway keeps Ibsen very much alive, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Henrik Ibsen is a genuinely international figure. His impact on the entire development of Western theatre is so profound that he forms part of almost every country's tradition. This is so obvious that it obscures perhaps the most astonishing aspect of his accomplishments: he reshaped an international art form using a minority language, spoken at the time by around two million people. Seeing - and hearing - his plays in Oslo and Bergen reminds you of this fact. It also overturns any preconceptions about Ibsen the stern moralist and social realist. In Norway, the old man is a lot of fun.
The Norwegian attitude to Ibsen is especially interesting for anyone approaching it from an Irish perspective. The two cultures share a great deal, each in the 19th century asserting its distinctiveness from its neighbour (in their case, Sweden) through literary nationalism. In both cases, there was a national theatre before an independent nation, with Norway's acting as a key inspiration for the Abbey. But we have a neurotic attitude to our literary and theatrical icons. We hover between wrapping them in sterile piety and dismissing them as old hat. More recently, as with James Joyce, we have adopted them as a cool brand without bothering to read them.
From this perspective, it is hard not to approach the prospect of seeing Ibsen in Norway with some dread, especially in the context of a dual centenary: of Norway's independence this year and of Ibsen's death next year. Given Ibsen's own role in the invention of the Norwegian nation, a sense of reverence mingled with national pride is to be expected. It is not for nothing, after all, that the very grand Nationaltheatret stands at the centre of Oslo flanked by the university, the Norwegian Parliament and the Royal Castle, and that Ibsen looks down from a pedestal in front of it. Yet from the three productions I saw (two of Peer Gynt and one of The Wild Duck), piety doesn't figure at all. Ibsen seems to be far too important to be approached without stringency, vigour and wit.
The Norwegians' approach to Ibsen is blessed with one huge advantage over the Irish attitude to, for example, Yeats. Ibsen's Norwegianness doesn't have to be proved. It can be taken completely for granted because it exists in an indestructible form: the language. An audience in Bergen or Oslo knows that it has access to an aspect of the great playwright that very few others can ever have. If Yeats wrote in Irish, and the Gaelic League had succeeded in its project of making the language a universal vernacular, we would probably be able to experience something similar. The Norwegians pulled off this great linguistic trick and Ibsen helped them to do it by giving the words they spoke a noble status in the wider world. In return, he gets in his native land an audience that knows he belongs to them in a very simple and utterly specific way.
Paradoxically, this knowledge has given the Norwegians the confidence to create a constant dialogue between their Ibsen and the rest of the world's. The Ibsen Festival, which has been staged every second year in Oslo since 1990, brings together native and foreign productions of the plays, with the visiting companies hailing from Britain, Germany, France, Greece, Lithuania, Bosnia, Armenia, China, Burkina Faso, Palestine and elsewhere.
There is an obvious element of national pride in these reminders of the dramatist's role as the nation's third great export, alongside oil and fish. But there is also a deliberate opening to cross-pollination. Because the Norwegians have their own Ibsen, they have no hang-ups about embracing other people's.
In conversations with Norwegian theatre people and with Professor Vigdis Ystad, editor-in-chief of the huge new 16-volume critical edition of Ibsen's works that is part of the centenary celebrations, I asked what Ibsen's language sounds like to his compatriots now. All of them said the same things: that it sounds direct, immediate, with a heightened rhetorical texture that remains nonetheless accessible. It hangs somewhere between poetry and prose, with a strong rhythmic undertow that doesn't get in the way of its meaning. Thus the difference between the poetic plays and the prose dramas is much less pronounced in the original than it is in translation.
This struck most forcefully when, having seen two different versions of the verse play Peer Gynt, I saw Eirik Stubø's production of the prose play The Wild Duck at the National Theatre, expecting it to have a very different feel. It didn't. The prose dialogue was spoken with a strong, almost declamatory beat, giving it an energy seldom apparent in translation. Stubø's production added to this directness by clearing away the 19th-century furniture, setting the play around the late 1960s, which makes sense of the father-son conflict and the rich boy's desire to slum it. The ease, fluidity and rapid movement of the production certainly suggested a confidence rooted in a complete comfort with Ibsen's language.
This is not to say that the Norwegians don't have their own linguistic neuroses. There are two official forms of the language, the minority Nynorsk (New Norwegian) and the dominant Bokmål (literally book language), which have complex historical and political roots. The split is reflected in the theatre, with the Nationaltheatret using Bokmål and Det Norske Teatret working in New Norwegian. This means that the spectacular Norske Teatret production of Peer Gynt, directed by the American avant-garde genius Robert Wilson and sure to be one of the staples of international celebrations of the Ibsen centenary, is translated into New Norwegian by the leading contemporary playwright Jon Fosse.
If anything, however, the contested nature of the language seems to have the positive effect of discouraging pedantry. Even Professor Ystad, who might be seen as an official guardian of Ibsen's texts, was not especially worried that the Fosse version of Peer Gynt leaves out significant chunks of Ibsen's original play.
This broad tolerance for a diversity of approaches keeps Ibsen alive, and there could hardly be a starker embodiment of it than the two productions I saw. Wilson's version at the beautiful art nouveau Den Nationale Scene in Bergen is a four-hour epic with lavish designs, Wilson's own breathtaking lighting, a superb new score by Michael Galasso that meets the challenge of Edvard Grieg's celebrated original, and a cast of 21 performers. Stein Winge's in Oslo had six performers, a minimal set and lasted for 90 minutes. Each is, in its own way, a radical approach, but the contrast between them displays an admirable open-mindedness. A willingness to take risks is underpinned by an unshakeable confidence that even a terrible failure will not dent Ibsen's greatness.
The Torshov theatre, where I saw Winge's Peer Gynt is the equivalent of the Abbey's Peacock, but with a more independent relationship to the mother ship. In a model that might be worth considering in the planning of the Abbey's move, the Torshov is completely separate from the hallowed National Theatre, sited in the less grand eastern suburbs of Oslo. It is given every few years to a different group of actors to play with, and Peer Gynt was the debut of a new triumvirate: Mads Ousdal, Trond Espen Seim and Jon Oigarden. They chose a radical Peer Gynt in which each would play the title part. The twist was that instead of the three Peers appearing sequentially, as in the original play, where we encounter the character in youth, middle age and old age, they occupied the stage simultaneously, as three aspects of male desire interacting with three fantasy women.
Essentially this was a riff on Ibsen's grand melody, the sort of deconstruction of a classic text that often becomes tiresome. But two things made it a gripping performance. One was the inventive energy of Winge's production, with its vivid physicality and imaginative use of space. The other was even more intriguing: the way the audience, mostly young, was obviously in on the game. People seemed to know the text so well they could take pleasure in the deconstruction, getting all the in-jokes. The sense of collusion dispelled any air of self-indulgence and left an Irish viewer not a little jealous at the possibilities created when a national classic really is a shared cultural property.
Robert Wilson's version of the play has in some respects precisely the opposite feel: a national classic being annexed to an outsider's vision. Even in New Norwegian and with a wonderfully adept local cast, this Peer is very much a Wilson production, immediately recognisable as such to anyone who saw, for example, his production of Woyzeck two years ago at the Dublin Theatre Festival. Some aspects of his take on the play - especially his rather heavy-handed send-up of Solveig, the admittedly rather sappy spirit of female goodness - would have appalled Ibsen himself. Yet Wilson also does Ibsen the immense service of proving his capacity to speak to the 21st century. The American director's unique ability to fuse space, light, colour and movement into a single physical image brings to life the poetic drama of Peer Gynt for a contemporary audience. The more fantastical or mysterious the scene, the better Wilson likes it.
The palace of the troll king is inhabited by brilliantly imagined semi-human creatures, at once visually gorgeous and terrifying. The shapeless Boyg is evoked with a thrilling ease, through the use of light and a simple framework. Peer's shipwreck is played out with cloth and light, contrasting shades of blue creating a perfect metaphor for the sinking into the depths. The Button Moulder who comes to claim Peer's life has a deathly paleness.
Wilson creates a flow of images that can compete with cinema's visual richness and seamless motion but that remains utterly theatrical. In doing so, he suggests that so long as Norway can retain an attitude toward him which balances so well an intimate familiarity and an open-minded cosmopolitanism, Ibsen should be good for another 100 years.
