Ibsen's lively art: A performance study of the major plays by Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker (review)

Book Review FREDERICK J. MARKER and LISE-LONE M~. Ibsen's lively art: A performance study o/the major plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Pp. 252, illustrated. $39·5°· In the Markers' fascinating performance history of six major Ibsen plays from Peer Gynt to John Gabriel Borkman, his own "lively an" is seen to devolve rapidly after his death in 1906 into me peculiar liveliness of his interpreters: the actors who innovate the roles, the auteurist directors who transform the conventions of Ibsen's late nineteenth century stagecraft into dematerialized modernist and post-modernist visions, and the designers who match the introspective distillations of a Reinhardt or a Bergman with comparably inventive anti-naturalistic approaches. Ibsen, as the Markers argue, was of necessity his own director/designer in the years before the transformation of a writers' into a directors' theatre; and his meticulous stage directions are recognized primarily as a sign-system for the realistic theatre, but not as an injunction against the new semiorics of the modem theatre of Craig or Meyerhold. What the Markers finally offer in this extraordinarily well-researched study is the chronicle of an "ongoing quest for an illumination of Ibsen's reuvre that will penetrate beyond the ostensibly realistic surface to its inner essence." (213) How did Theodor Andersen stage the Peer Gym shipwreck in Copenhagen in 1886? How did Betty Hennings' Nora influence both the reception and the understanding of A Doll's House in 1879? How did Munch's "regenerative decimation" of the realistic mise-en-scene in the Kammerspiele version of Glwsts in 1906 alter the tragedy's angle of vision for the twentieth century? How did Meyerhold and Zadek's Marxist aesthetic operate to deconstruct Ibsen's middle-class world and excoriate its values? An is revealed in the Markers' recreation of key European productions of Ibsen. They draw upon promptbooks, reviews, designs, interviews, archival material and memoirs; and, although there is a uniformity of tone and an historic Objectivity of presentation in their writing. I imagine that some of their observations are also playgoers' accounts of actual performance. This apparent objectivity, indeed, makes for some difficulty in evaluating the suc- 350 Book Reviews cess of innovative approaches to Ibsen. .It is never entirely clear where the Markers draw the line between "traditionalism" and "travesty." how we mediate between the mummification of Ibsen by excessive homage and the desecration of his drama by wanton irreverence, whether the eye of the perfonnance historian is that of a camera or that of a transformer. There is an implicit endorsement. for instance, in the Markers' account of lngmar Bergman's "existentialist" productions of Ibsen and his stark "dematerialization" of physical reality. But the tendency to use Bergman, in virtually every chapter, as a yardstick by which both museum-piece realism and mindless innovation are to be measured is in itself a problem for reception theory. They claim, for example, that in his 1964 production of Hedda Gabler Bergman "rediscover[ed] this particular play for our own time" and that it remains "one of the truly revolutionary and influential Ibsen productions of this century" (177). There follows a detailed · description of Mago's set - the claustrophobic red box, stripped of realistic detail, the dominating mirror, the eerily sliding wall-screens - in short the translation of Ibsenian realism into a fonn of Strindbergian expressionism. But there is little sense, in what follows, of the Strindbergian misogyny that envelops Bergman's Hedda, the deliberate meanness of his editorial changes, his stripping away of every vestige of her poetry and her dignity, so that all we confront in the end is a reductive portrait of a neurotic. (I draw on my own experience of the Bergman Hedda in the Vancouver Playhouse production .) The same is true of his Nora - the only version of the play, in my experience, where audience sympathy swings towards the pathos of the vulnerable and abandoned Torvald, pummeled and beaten by a woman who is brutal and irritating in equal measure . (I draw upon my experience of the Bergman Doll's House in the Vancouver Fringe Festival.) This is not to assert any superior claims for my own personal response, but to...