Newly arrived from a much-lauded stint at the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, Rachel O'Riordan has undertaken to make "work of scale by women" during her time as artistic director of the Lyric. What better place to start than with Ibsen's once-shocking heroine, her story reimagined by prolific playwright Tanika Gupta? Ibsen's understanding of the fears and frustrations of women in the Nineteenth Century stood out among writers and thinkers of his time and modern women writers are likely to warm to him. Stef Smith's version of A Doll's House, offering three manifestations of Nora and bringing her Read more ...

Like Hamlet and both parts of Goethe's Faust, with which it shares the highest peak of poetic drama, Ibsen's Peer Gynt is very long, timeless enough to resonate in a contemporary setting and sufficiently ambiguous in its mythic treatment of the pursuit of self to take a wide variety of interpretations. David Hare's adaptation, moving between Scotland, Florida and Africa, finds its own nuanced language to mix with contemporary colloqualisms but hardly marks a radical break from the Norwegian master; so much the better. His Peter Gynt keeps so many possibilities fully in play and is a gift for Read more ...

The past haunts the present and looks likely to torpedo the future in Rosmersholm, the lesser-known Ibsen play now receiving a major West End revival in welcome defiance of the commercial odds. The protean Sonia Friedman, this venture's producer, was wise to grant the directing reins to Ian Rickson, who has made many a Pinter play land in a similar environment (and directed the National's glorious Translations last year). Blessed with the design team of one's dreams and an ace trio of leads, Ibsen's sometimes-murky psychology here rivets throughout, even Read more ...

Munch’s The Scream is as piercing as it has ever been, and its silence does nothing to lessen its viscerally devastating effect. It was painted in 1893, but it was a lithograph produced two years later – now the star of the biggest UK exhibition of Munch’s prints for a generation – that would make it famous. Munch's now rare black and white lithograph includes an inscription, which translated from the German reads: “I felt a large scream pass through nature”. Perhaps by spelling out the true subject of The Scream it gilds the lily, but in conveying the agony of empathy it offers an Read more ...

Ellida (Pia Tjelta) has a choice to make, the outcome of which will bind her future to her past or her present, each represented by a man. On the one hand, there is the tempestuous seafaring Stranger (Øystein Røger) to whom, long ago and in a fit of delirium, she pledged herself; on the other, there is her devoted and rational doctor husband Wangel (Adrian Rawlins). The consequences of neither option are clear, for while Ellida has lived through both periods, she has hardly been alive in either. Instead, the heroine of Ibsen's 1888 drama is numbed, adrift, and it is only now – under Read more ...

Beware the smile that Edward Hogg wears like a shield in the opening scenes of The Wild Duck, the Ibsen play refashioned into the most scalding production in many a year by Robert Icke, here in career-surpassing form. Playing James Ekdal, the photographer previously known as Hjalmar, Hogg disarms you from the outset with a bonhomie just waiting to snap. By the play's end, there's precious little evidence of mirth given the cumulative wreckage on view: building upon his forays into Shakespeare, Schiller, Chekhov, and the Greeks, Icke propels Ibsen's 1884 text straight into the heart of Read more ...

What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...

Nikki Amuka-Bird spent the summer in Antigua, swimming and scuba diving and could have claimed to be working. She is playing Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Donmar, in a version directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah transposed to the Caribbean. Amuka-Bird spent part of her childhood in Antigua and, home for a holiday, was thinking about Ibsen’s restless heroine, for whom the sea represents freedom.Born in 1976 in Nigeria, where her father is a newspaper editor, she grew up with her mother, a journalist and later a Body Shop franchisee, in the Caribbean and the UK, where she attended Read more ...

Theatre conventions are a funny thing. Today, it’s actually quite difficult to see a modern classic dressed in the clothes and performed on the set of its specific historical period. It has to be in contemporary dress. And in a contemporary setting. It’s almost as if producers and directors no longer trust audiences to use their imaginations – poor public, it has to be spoonfed. Ivo van Hove, perhaps the most exciting theatre director since Katie Mitchell, has taken Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 masterpiece and, with help from playwright Patrick Marber, updated it. He’s also cast Ruth Wilson as Hedda, Read more ...

Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so real that one is almost forced to believe it". But very little seems real or spontaneous in Matthew Warchus's production of The Master Builder. It certainly doesn't help that chilling events from the past or visions of the paranormal are underlined with creepy music and lighting when they should be torn from the characters' insides, the sounds Read more ...

Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ruthlessly as Euripides, Strindberg or Bergman, who was in turn influenced by both of the great Scandinavian playwrights. Something of that pitilessness does emerge in Richard Eyre’s return to the Almeida, chiefly through an unsparing performance by Lydia Leonard and a blend of cold intimacy with powerful nature in Tim Hatley’s designs. The lower depths of pity and terror, though, remain unsounded. Read more ...

Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?Alexander Mørk-Eidem took the question as the Read more ...