Look into any man’s heart you please, and you will always find, in everyone, at least one black spot which he or she has to keep concealed.”
These words of the 19th-century Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, will stare straight in the face of the Delhi audience this coming week with the Delhi Ibsen College Festival. Royal Norwegian Embassy in association with the Dramatic Art & Design Academy (DADA) initiated Delhi Ibsen Festival in 2008 as a part of its campaign to promote the work and legacy of the great writer.
This year’s Ibsen Festival, from September 22 to 26 at LTG theatre, is open only to chosen colleges of the Delhi University. The drama societies of five colleges — LSR, Miranda House, KMC, Kamala Nehru and Maitreyi — have been provided technical and professional infrastructure and a sum of `75,000 each to showcase their interpretations of Ibsen.
Nissar Allana, director of Dramatic Art & Design Academy, considers this festival as a tool to raise the standard of the city’s university theatre. “The culture of university theatre must get enough importance, because eventually, it feeds into the amateur and professional theatre. So, raising the level of university’s cultural work contributes to escalation of overall standard of professional theatre. With better infrastructure and creative freedom, we want college teams to evolve professionally,” says Allana.
Allana recalls that when he was approached by the Norwegian embassy for organising the festival two year back, Ibsen to him was already relevant in the Indian context as the writer had been a part of Indian theatre since 1930s. Allana calls him “the co-author of Indian theatre movement in terms of experimental work based on realism”.
Ibsen is often referred to as the father of modern theatre. His work reached out to the realities that lay hidden behind the façades of social norms, at times disquieting many of his contemporaries. His work questions the conditions of life and issues of morality.
Ibsen’s content challenges the society for the placement of women in it, and suggests that a woman’s self is more important than her role as a wife or a mother. His revolutionary expression outraged the government and the church.
It was not a happy childhood for Ibsen. At the age of eight, his family went bankrupt, his father found solace in alcohol and his mother chose religion for comfort. This poverty-driven tension had deep impact on Ibsen’s life, his writing and characters in it.
His overbearing and bitter father and his submissive mother kept appearing in his plays, specially Bard, The Doll House, The Wild Duck and The Ghosts. In 1850, Ibsen entered the first of his three writing periods, creating romantic historical dramas such as Brandand Peer Gynt, Lady Inger of Ostraat, The Vikings of Helgeland and Emperor and Galilean. In this phase, he showed sympathy for historical characters which were famous for being rebellious. In 1877, Ibsen entered the second phase of his writing, also known as the era of his “problem plays”, and wrote a series of plays dealing with social and psychological problems. This period, which started with the writing of Pillars of Society, dealt with contemporary life in realistic settings.
Ibsen’s third period of work started after he returned to Norway from his travels. It was referred to as the “symbolist period” containing elements of defeat.
In the festival, the participating colleges have picked up characters and contents from Ibsen’s writing and tried to go beyond the defined and the stated. Miranda House’s The House that Binny Made is a combination of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Indian playwright Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure. The concept explores women’s choices and identities in Indian families and marriages. LSR’s The Mannequins in Elysium is triangular plot that delves into the paradoxes underscoring the lives of three strong characters of Ibsen’s plays — Nora, Hedda and Helena. Kamla Nehru’s Lakshya aims at exploring the journey of women in Ibsen’s plays.
Maitreyi College is focusing on Ibsen as a character which can see the hidden and bitter truth. KMC is trying to play with the dramaturgic conventions in The Tame Duck. Kewal Arora, faculty in-charge of the KMC drama society, explains that his team is walking just the edges of Ibsen’s work and telling the story which he had, but chose to keep it to himself.
Serious drama must strive to uncover hidden truths and should be based on the characters and conflicts of mankind. While Ibsen gives liberal latitude and open space for experiments, it is well-known that with great freedom comes great responsibility.
The path is difficult in being the maze and the destination ambiguous in being a cloud. The audience thus keeps its fingers crossed as the fresh take on the old in ways that never were.