United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Not so very long afterwards they came upon Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler"; and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines in the world's literature, that was the one which most appealed to her.
I asked myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Thus, when we think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in fact, ransacking the store-house of memory.
The public that filled the coffers of the Bijou Theatre was paying its money not so much to see a play by the author of A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler as to see a performance by a clever and tricky actress of alluring personality, who was better advertised and, to the average theatre-goer, better known than Henrik Ibsen.
And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of Célimène would have thought of Hedda Gabler, that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.
It was the scene foreordained for the hatching of "Hedda Gabler." But don't imagine that Munich, when it comes to elegance, must stand or fall with the Luitpold. Far from it, indeed. There are other cafés of noble and elevating quality in that delectable town plenty of them, you may be sure.
The trouble with Hedda Gabler as a play is that it contains not a single personage that the audience can love. The crowd demands those so-called "sympathetic" parts that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent. And since the crowd is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win. Hence the convention of the "happy ending," insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the public.
One evening I heard her giving Frau Lichtenfeld some random impressions about Hedda Gabler which she extracted from me five years ago; giving them with an impassioned conviction of which I was never guilty.
In 'Hedda Gabler' as in the 'Enemy of the People' Ibsen gives up the Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of 'Ghosts. With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework of the "well-made play" or at least to that modification of the Scribe formula which Augier and Dumas fils had devised for their own use. The action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it does in the 'Demi-monde. The exposition is contained in the first act, clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us, Hedda and her husband, Mrs. Elvsted and Eilert, and the sinister figure of Inspector Brack in the background. This first act, even to its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been constructed by Augier, just as the scene in the second act between Hedda and Brack recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this commonplace interview between a married demi-vierge and an homme-
He decided to see the end of Hedda Gabler another time. The Andante, the Grecian ruin and vine-leaves were curiously blended in his mind.... Though several days had passed since the Club affair, he had not seen Beth Truba again. This fact largely occupied his thinking. He would not telephone nor call, without a suggestion from her.
Haskins sir? it's natural, thank you don't be quite so fresh . . . Hello, Johnny ten, fifteen, twenty chase along now or they'll take the letters off your cap . . . Beg pardon count it again, please Oh, don't mention it . . . Vaudeville? thanks; not on your moving picture I was to see Carter in Hedda Gabler on Wednesday night with Mr.
Word Of The Day