the times | Monday February 21 2022 9arts
his last few plays. Norway was
moving fast at the time: the
language was changing;
skiing was becoming an
important sport; and the
influence of Sigmund Freud,
artists such as Munch and
younger writers such as Knut
Hamsun were putting the
unconscious mind to the
front of people’s attention.
“Hamsun would tell
people that Ibsen’s plays fit
together, but life doesn’t fit
together,” Bang-Hansen
says. Ibsen couldn’t take that
lying down.
So although Ibsen gave When We
Dead Awaken the subtitle “a dramatic
epilogue”, he meant it also as a new
beginning. “I think Ibsen desperately
wanted to make it into the 20th
century,” Bang-Hansen says, “but he
didn’t manage it.”
The next morning I see the softly
spoken director work with his cast at
another of Ibsen’s homes, a flat
situated a block away on the Victoria
Terrasse. The Norwegian Ibsen
Company will be taking the play to
the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill
not long after producing Little Eyolf
and The Lady from the Sea at the
same venue.
Going through a scene with his
mostly Norwegian cast, Bang-HansenH
ow does a writer stay
hungry even when
steeped in success?
Henrik Ibsen,
Norway’s greatest
playwright and still
reputedly the
second-most
performed playwright after
Shakespeare, used to keep a scorpion
in an upturned beer glass on his desk.
“It was there to remind him that he
needed to sting,” says Kjetil Bang-
Hansen, the celebrated Norwegian
director who is preparing to stage
Ibsen’s rarely revived final play, When
We Dead Awaken.
We are sitting in Ibsen’s study in his
final home, a mansion flat near the
royal palace in Oslo that he moved to
in 1895. The flat was turned into the
Ibsen Museum, but closed in 2018,
with plans to reopen this spring. The
furnishings are kept as close as
possible to how they were when Ibsen
and his wife, Suzannah, lived there,
including some eye-catching linoleum.
Ibsen was past the scorpion stage
when he wrote this play, an
unconventional, soul-searching,
impressionistic story of a sculptor
reflecting on the compromises he
made for success as he and his wife
visit a fjord spa.
By then, though, as Bang-Hansen
points out as we sit by Ibsen’s desk in
our plastic foot protectors (that
flooring won’t just look after itself), the
great man had other ways of giving
himself a kick up the behind. To the
right of the desk is a large painting of
Ibsen accepting his honorary
doctorate from Uppsala University.
Behind the desk, however, looms an
equally large painting of his arch-rival,
the Swedish dramatist August
Strindberg — he had his competition
looking over his shoulder as he wrote
his final works. It is as if Noel
Gallagher had made Oasis albums
with a mural of Damon Albarn on the
studio wall.
Bang-Hansen, 81, a former director
of Norway’s National Theatre, is
preparing the show to be performed in
a mix of Norwegian (with subtitles)
and English. Is there a reason why
this play is one of his least known?
It would surely be, as the show’s
producer Kare Conradi later admits,
easier to get bums on seats with
another Ghosts, Doll’s House or
Hedda Gabler.
It wasn’t even a big success at the
time, even if James Joyce and Bernard
Shaw would come to speak up for it.
Ibsen published the play in December
1899, a few months before the series of
strokes that kept him from writing
another before his death in 1906. Is
When We Dead Awaken any good?
Bang-Hansen likes it a lot, even if he
wonders how the “ironic, pragmatic”
British will respond to it.
“I think people are divided about it,”
he says in accented but tremendous
English. “I think because people are
bewildered about what kind of play it
is. It’s an abstract play from the master
of realism. A tricky play but a very,
very interesting play.”
Although Ibsen was in his sixties
when he returned to Oslo (then
called Kristiania) in the early 1890s
after 27 years abroad, he wanted to
stay current.
Go to the recently opened 13-storey
Munch museum on the harbour, and
near to the zoned-off area dedicated to
The Scream are a selection of paintings
from that decade that responded to
Ibsen’s work and helped to influencereflects on how crucial the
nation’s landscape was to
Ibsen, even when based in
the capital. “We are not an
urban people. We don’t wear
suits, we don’t wear ties.”
They go through a scene in
which the Ibsen figure,
Rubek the sculptor, gets
into a self-loathing speech
about turning from artist to
mere craftsman.
Bang-Hansen explains to
them how they must bridge
the gap between then and
now. They can’t pretend it’s- “But it’s not a fight
between a modern couple either.”
He is not talking in English purely
for The Times’s benefit. The Irish actor
James Browne is playing the part of
the local squire, Ulfheim. Even on first
read-through he is having lots of fun
with this vulgar interloper whose use
of English underlines his outsider
status. (Ibsen is funnier than some
English productions allow for, Bang-
Hansen suggests.)
Later, sitting in Ibsen’s now-
unfurnished dining room, Browne
enthuses about the power of the more
ornate language. “The more disgusting
the thing you are saying, the more
beautiful you make it,” he says. “It’s
the Irish way.” Having seen the
company’s Lady from the Sea at the
Coronet, he jumped at the chance to
work with them even though he
doesn’t speak Norwegian.
“The rest of the cast’s English is
incredible,” he says, “but even when
Norwegians speak in English they
speak with certain rhythms, and Ibsen
was writing with that music in mind.”
Conradi, 50, is a hugely successful
actor in Norway who also had
international success with the Netflix
Viking comedy Norsemen. Part of the
reason he set up the Norwegian Ibsen
Company in 2011 was because the
country’s national playwright didn’t
have a company devoted to his work.
Yes, the National Theatre in Oslo puts
on an Ibsen festival every two years.
And yes Norwegian children are likely
— although no longer certain — to
study him at school. Yet if Britain has
the Royal Shakespeare Company, why
couldn’t Norway have something
bearing Ibsen’s name?“I mean, we are very proud of
Ibsen,” he says in perfect English — he
studied acting at Lamda in London.
“But you get more proud of him
when you go abroad; you see his
impact in countries that don’t have
such an open environment as we do in
Norway. You are reminded how
dangerous his work can be.”
And why When We Dead Awaken?
Partly because the play is about
characters “trying to regain life”, just
like we all are at the moment. What’s
more, the Ibsen Museum has a theatre
in the basement that is about to open.
Conradi was asked to provide a show
for that too; what better than a play
that was written upstairs and reflects
on Ibsen’s own relevance and legacy?
So this atypical, adventurous final
work is one way to alter our
understanding of the great man.
Another, I suggest, might be to tweak
his image. The photographs of Ibsen
that do the rounds tend to be from his
imperious later years with those white
triangles of beard that turns his face
into a forbidding, bespectacled square.
Might not some sort of unbearded
images of young Ibsen make him look
more approachable?
Actually, Conradi says, young
Ibsen had a big black beard instead of
a big white beard, but he takes the
point. In fact, he has done more than
that. He has been in touch with
Caroline Wilson, a professor of
craniofacial identification at the
University of Dundee.
She used a 3D scan of Richard III’s
skull to create an image of his face
after his skeleton was discovered in- Could she use photographs to
come up with an image of the
unbearded Ibsen?
Could she? She did. Except Conradi,
the spoilsport, is keeping it to himself.
For the moment, at least. “I don’t want
it to be used because he himself
decided, ‘This is the look, this is me.’
He was vain, but he was also shy.”
He is protective enough of Ibsen,
then, to keep his iconography intact
for the moment. The new picture
did, however, change the way he saw
him. “It made him more vulnerable. I
loved it.”
The mystery of
Ibsen’s last play
As When We Dead Awaken, the final play by
Henrik Ibsen, comes to London, Dominic Maxwell
travels to Norway to uncover its secrets
Henrik Ibsen in his
study in Oslo. Top:
Oystein Roger and
Andrea Braein Hovig
will star in When We
Dead AwakenHe had a scorpion
on his desk to
remind him he
needed to sting
JULIE PIKEWhen We Dead Awaken
is at the Coronet
Theatre, London W11,
Feb 24 to April 2.
thecoronettheatre.com