This book collects translations of four of Ibsen’s plays by Michael Meyer. They’re all, no surprise, quite dark. I’ve talked about An Enemy of the People already and I think I’ve reviewed A Doll’s House before, back when I was fortunate enough to be able to perform in a production of it at a local theater. The other two plays here, Ghosts & Rosmersholm, are similar in a lot of ways; they both revolve around these kind of claustrophobic old houses where the inhabitants are, in all the good old existential ways, trapped. Relationships are both the source of a lot of the existential suffering, but they also hold a faint promise of escape. This is Ibsen, so I don’t really think it’s a spoiler to say that those promises of escape don’t really pan out. Those two plays are much less theatrical than An Enemy of the People or A Doll’s House; there’s just less action and you get the feeling that the sets and the stage should just kind of be shrouded in darkness for productions of these plays. I really like Ibsen as a playwright. He understands things about staging that a lot of idea-driven playwrights don’t; A Doll’s House, of course, ends on a sound effect, one of the most devastating sound effects in the history of theater. But the writing is rich and multi-layered as well. He’s talking about ideas, but also about people, and, to a large degree, everyone is really trapped in their roles in his plays, often by societal expectations, sometimes by their own moral misjudgments and failings. But he often refuses to provide the catharsis you might expect. Ghosts in particular just has a devastating kind of slow-fade ending where you just feel the lights dropping and the stage being slowly plunged into the blackness of despair. These are often challenging plays, but they’re undeniably masterpieces and they’re still haunting to this day. 4 stars.
tl;dr – collection of Ibsen’s plays is dark, grim, strong medicine; rich, layered writing explores both characters and ideas in challenging and powerful ways. 4 stars.