Henrik Ibsen
This symbolic play is centred on a lady called Ellida. She is the daughter of a lighthouse-keeper, and grew up where the fjord met the open sea; she loves the sea. She is married to Doctor Wangel, a doctor in a small town in West Norway (in the mountains). He has two daughters (Bolette and Hilde) by his previous wife, now deceased. He and Ellida have a son who dies as a baby, which puts a big strain on their marriage. Wangel, fearing for Ellida’s
...Karsten Bernick is the dominant businessman in a small coastal town in Norway, with interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. Now he is planning his most ambitious project yet, backing a railway which will connect the town to the main line and open a fertile valley which he has been secretly buying up.
Suddenly his past explodes on him. Johan Tønnesen, his wife's younger brother, comes back from
...7) Little Eyolf
Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf in the original Norwegian title) is an 1894 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play was first performed on January 12, 1895 in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
Little Eyolf tells the story of the Allmers family. At the outset of the play, the father, Alfred, has just returned from a trip to the mountains. While there, he resolved to focus foremost on
...8) Rosmersholm
John Gabriel Borkman is the second-to-last play of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, written in 1896.
The Borkman family fortunes have been brought low by the imprisonment of John Gabriel who used his position as a bank manager to speculate with his investors' money. The action of the play takes place eight years after Borkman's release when John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs. Borkman, and her twin sister Ella Rentheim
...12) Peer Gynt
Fearing rejection by her community, Helene Alving stayed with her philandering husband up until his death. She finds out that her son Osvald not only has congenital syphilis, but is in love with the maid without knowing she is his half-sister. Eventually Mrs. Alving must face the cruel choice of euthanizing her own son as he descends into a syphilitic madness. As with Ibsen's A Doll's House, Ghosts was an intentionally controversial
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