Showing results by author "Henrik Ibsen" in All Categories

Master builder Halvard Solness is a self-made man. With no professional qualifications, he has built himself up through ruthless ambition and achieved a position of power and domination in his home town. But his success has come at a cost. His marriage is empty, destroyed by a personal tragedy that has left him wracked with guilt and pain, and he is increasingly frightened of failure and being displaced by the next generation. Then a mysterious young woman, Hilde Wangel, appears from the mountains, claiming to have met Solness 10 years earlier, when she was only 13.

Often described as ‘the father of realism’, Henrik Ibsen was a pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Included in this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman.

This collection of three of Henrik Ibsen's most well-known and important plays is voiced by a sparkling cast and features music, SFX and a full soundscape. Born in 1828, Norwegian playwright, theatre director and poet Ibsen, wrote in Danish yet lived for many years in Italy and Germany. Heralded as one the most distinguished dramatists after Shakespeare, by the early 20th century A Doll's House became the world's most performed play.

Nora Helmer has everything a young housewife could want: Beautiful children, an adoring husband, and a bright future. But when a carelessly buried secret rises from the past, Nora’s well-calibrated domestic ideal starts to crumble. Ibsen’s play is as fresh today as it was when it first stormed the stages of 19th-century Europe.

Nora seems to have it all – a loving husband, children and a comfortable life. But when a secret from her past threatens her carefully constructed world, she is forced to confront the stark realities of her marriage and the issues of her gender in society. The recording is followed by a fascinating conversation in which the actors talk how powerful and relevant the play still is today and how this unique project came to be. Exclusively for Audible the interview is followed by reviews of A Doll’s House, written between 1879 and 1900.

Hedda Gabler, the daughter of a deceased General, marries dull George Tesman and foresees a life of middle class tedium stretching ahead when they return from their honeymoon. Increasingly, she is drawn into the clutches of her admirer, Judge Brack, who seeks to establish a ménage a trois. Then the brilliant but dissolute Eilert Lovborg, a former flame, arrives to rival her husband for an academic post.

Controversy and hidden pasts are suddenly and painfully exposed as wealthy widow Mrs Alving prepares to open a new orphanage in memory of her husband. Her treasured son Oswald’s return from Paris and her relationship with old friend Pastor Manders are no longer the source of joy they once were, as secrets are turned into a frightening and desperate reality.

Now, for the first time in audio, Blackstone presents seven great plays in one volume: Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, Dumas' Camille, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Shaw's Arms and the Man, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. These productions illustrate the development of European drama from ancient times to the threshold of the modern theater.

A Doll's House, written two years after The Pillars of Society, was the first of Ibsen's plays to create a sensation and is now perhaps his most famous play, and required reading in many secondary schools and universities. The play was highly controversial when first published, as it is sharply critical of 19th Century marriage norms. It follows the formula of well-made play up until the final act, when it breaks convention by ending with a discussion, not an unravelling. It is often called the first true feminist play, although Ibsen denied this.View our full collection of podcasts at our ...

When a small town relies on tourists flocking to its baths, will a report of dangerously polluted waters be enough to shut them down? Henrik Ibsen weighs the cost of public health versus a town's livelihood and skewers the complicity of the masses in his classic and still timely play.

Nora, a banker's pampered and petted wife, forges a signature to obtain money for her ailing husband. The play's theme, touting a woman's independence, shocked audiences at the time of its premiere.

A Doll's House, published in 1879, was the earliest of Ibsen's "social dramas", and the first of his works to attract attention outside of Scandinavia. The central theme of the play is a woman's right to individual self-development, and represents, as humourist Stephen Leacock observed of many Ibsen plays, "a profound problem stated but not solved".

A Doll's House deals with the life of a married woman who lacked opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated society. It caused a stir at the time, arousing sensation and controversy that went far beyond the world of theater.

Ghosts is a play by the legendary Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1881, the play is a scathing commentary on 19th-century morality. Its controversial subject matter includes frank discussions of incest, euthanasia, criticism of religion, and venereal disease, a basket of deplorable themes that scandalized Victorian society. Ghosts is the story of Helen Alving, a widow who is haunted by the many mistresses of her deceased husband and by her troubled son. The theme is a refutation of the idea that one ought to sacrifice one’s dreams on the altar of duty.

This collection contains the following works: Medea by Sophocles Antigone by Sophocles Agamemnon by Aeschylus Eumenides by Aeschylus The Choephori by Aeschylus The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare The Tragedy of Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare The Tragedy of King Lear by William Shakespeare The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare.

The Wild Duck (Vilanden) is a tragedy with comic episodes. Ibsen himself characterized the play as a tragicomedy. It depicts ordinary life realistically instead of romantically and sentimentally, a revolutionary concept in Ibsen's time. The play is now generally acknowledged as one of Ibsen's supreme accomplishments.

Peer Gynt, the five-act romantic play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Based on a Norwegian folk hero, the title character is a rogue who will be destroyed unless the love of a woman saves him. At a wedding he meets Solveig, who falls in love with him, but Peer ruins the wedding by abducting, then abandoning the bride. Then Peer goes global, misbehaving in a trail of adventures around the world. When he finally returns to Norway, old and embittered, Solveig welcomes him home, and he's redeemed by her love.

An Enemy of the People is an 1882 play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who wrote it in response to the public outcry against his previous play, Ghosts, which challenged the hypocrisy of 19th-century morality. An Enemy of the People tells the story of a man who dares to speak an unpalatable truth and is punished for it. Ibsen uses the language of comic exaggeration through the mouth of his spokesman, the idealist Doctor Thomas Stockmann, who rejects all absolute principles of either wisdom or morality.

Dans cette maison où la femme est et n'est qu'une poupée, les hommes sont des pantins, veules et pleutres. Sans doute Nora incarne-t-elle une sorte de moment auroral du féminisme, alors qu'être, c'est sortir, partir. Et Ibsen, grâce à ce chef-d'œuvre, accède au panthéon de la littérature mondiale. Mais si sa poupée se met, sinon à vivre, du moins à le vouloir, au point de bousculer au passage l'alibi de l'instinct maternel, c'est qu'autour d'elle les hommes se meurent.

A door slams, and the echoes never fade. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) is a play that doesn't shout—it lingers, unsettling and undeniable. Beneath the surface of a seemingly ordinary household lies a quiet storm, gathering strength with every polite exchange, every carefully placed smile. Nora Helmer is a wife, a mother, a woman adored. Her home is warm, her life is comfortable, her husband sings her praises. But when a long-kept secret begins to unravel, so does the delicate balance of her world.