Ibsen’s plays are gloomy, solemn affairs, full of sad, thwarted lives. Or so I thought – until I went on a voyage around Norway to find out what made the writer tick.
Confession time: I have always harboured a prejudice against Ibsen. I have thought he was too solemn for my taste, too sober, too glum. I believe that comedy must live alongside tragedy, as my two favourite playwrights – Shakespeare and Chekhov – prove.
But when I was offered the part of Dr Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and read the play, I found I couldn’t put it down. Never mind the comedy/tragedy issue, this was like a thriller. In fact, Peter Benchley borrowed the plot for his bestseller, Jaws: a small coastal town is threatened with closure, except in Ibsen’s version it’s a health spa and the danger in the water is not a shark, but poisonous contamination. The man who has made this discovery, Dr Stockmann, finds himself in a battle against the mayor (his brother) and the rest of the town.
I accepted the job with a feeling of excitement and curiosity. Would this be the moment I became converted to Ibsen? I started work with a visit to Norway, with director Daniel Evans (also the Sheffield Crucible’s new artistic director), and designer, Ben Stone. I’ve done these kinds of research trips throughout my career, and they always yield surprising discoveries.
We flew to Oslo, where the sun sparkled on the fjord, and where we were given an Ibsen tour by Yngve Marcussen, a theatre lecturer – large, red-haired, and very good company. Norway’s National theatre is fronted by statues of two of its great writers: Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. They are both the same size. Ibsen insisted on it. He was self-conscious about his height – a mere 5ft 2in – and spent his life wearing raised heels, a big top hat, and even brushing his hair into an upward sweep.
I thought this might provide a clue to Dr Stockmann, who is the ultimate outsider. But exactly how autobiographical is the role? Historically, I know the play was partly born from the reception to Ghosts (written just before Enemy), which was vilified because of its syphilis theme. In Ghosts, Ibsen had created what is arguably his masterpiece, yet instead of being praised to the skies, he felt he was fighting the world. Dr Stockmann undergoes the same reversal of fortune.
The Ibsen Museum in Oslo is built around the apartment where the playwright and his wife Suzannah lived for the last decade of his life. You can visit it, as long as you don’t mind looking silly in blue plastic overshoes.
I found it strange and moving to be an intruder in the Ibsens’ posh but gloomy home, the walls painted in muddy shades of brown and green (what would it be like in a Norwegian winter, lit only by lamps?). There was the desk where he wrote, with a view of the royal palace, and, bizarrely, a portrait of his arch rival, August Strindberg, with disturbed, staring eyes, on the wall behind. (Ibsen named the painting “Emerging Madness”.)
He clearly had a sense of humour, and it extended to his very last moment. We peered into his bedroom, with its tiny wooden bed, almost like a cot. Ibsen died here: on hearing his nurse tell some visitors that he seemed better, this hugely argumentative writer said: “On the contrary!” and promptly died.
The playwright now lies in the VIP section of Oslo’s main cemetery. When Ibsen finished writing Enemy of the People, he said he didn’t know whether to call it a drama or a comedy. At the cemetery, there was evidence beneath our feet. The pavement is inlaid with a trail of quotes from the plays, and the one from Enemy comes after Stockmann’s confrontation with the townspeople: discovering that his clothes are torn, he says, “If you go out to fight for freedom and truth, you should never wear your best trousers,” which sounds like a line written by Tom Stoppard.
We visited Vigeland Park, filled with bronze and granite statues. The sculptor Gustav Vigeland made several fine busts of Ibsen, but there’s not much else to connect the two men – not at first sight, anyway. Vigeland’s life project was to fill the grounds of this city park, and he had only one subject: the nude – dozens of them, hundreds. In the fast-fading light of an Oslo afternoon – a couple swinging over one another’s backs, some kids rushing forward – they took my breath away.
Vigeland’s style led to accusations that he was a Nazi sympathiser – the thick, muscular bodies look vaguely like Aryan super-people – but his work represents a completely opposite ideology: a celebration of being human, and varied. The negative propaganda is an example of the same short-sighted, narrow-minded thinking that Ibsen battled for much of his career, and that he dramatises so vividly in Enemy of the People.
I decided I might have been wrong about the gloom in Ibsen’s work. Maybe it’s more to do with something in the Scandinavian character, something the writer actively kicks against. The next day we travelled by train to the south-eastern coast, where Ibsen spent his childhood. The family had a summer home at Venstøp, which became their only home when Ibsen’s drunken father lost their money. This is now another Ibsen museum.
In his bedroom, little Henrik had a puppet theatre, and there are examples of his artwork: caricatures of his siblings as monkeys and dogs. Here was humour again, though dark, almost grotesque.
Ibsen’s actual birthplace – a few miles away, at Skien – could have been the model for the small provincial town at the heart of Enemy of the People. It has hilly streets with clapperboard houses in white, grey and red. Down below, the river mixes with the sea.
Ibsen described it as a place of “storming, soughing, seething waters”. As in his Oslo apartment, and in a way I find hard to describe, I got a clear, private feel of what he might have been like, only this time as a boy.
It was a cool, drizzly Sunday afternoon. The town was deserted. Probably quite boring to grow up here; if you were a short, sensitive child, you’d reach for your imagination.
Being in Skien made us aware that, despite its epic shape, Enemy is actually about little people fighting among themselves in a little town. This is important: it brushes away the heroic glow that can settle around the play.
Some translations, such as Arthur Miller’s, choose to enhance the heroism – one good guy against a load of baddies – but the version we’re doing, by Christopher Hampton, is much quirkier, and more challenging. Stockmann is telling the truth about the water contamination, but nobody wants to hear it. The situation starts to threaten his own sanity.
We went to Skien town centre for what was meant to be the highlight of the trip, a visit to the house where Ibsen was born, and after which my character is named – Stockmannsgarden – only to discover that we hadn’t done our homework.
The place no longer exists; it’s a bookstore called Ark, part of a shopping arcade. Nearby stood another statue of the playwright – a giant figure, striding forward with bearded chin held high, heading for the history books.
It looked preposterous, particularly as, along with Chekhov, Ibsen invented the theatrical antihero.
On our last evening in Oslo we ate at the Theatercaféen – a big, elegant, European-style cafe across the road from the National theatre – with Ola Johannessen, a leading actor, director and writer.
He said of Ibsen: “I love the work, but would have hated the actual man: this tiny, pompous fellow, with his big top hat and all his medals pinned on his chest.”
I thought about the Ibsen I had learned about – the small boy discovering art in Skien and Venstøp, the grand old man dying in his Oslo apartment – and realised that I had become absolutely mesmerised by him.
So the last laugh is on me. After 40-odd years in the business, I am discovering a new great playwright, while everyone else has known this about Ibsen for rather a long time.
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