Diving to the Bottom

Swiss Director François Rochaix — newly appointed Director of the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training — will open the A.R.T. Loeb Stage season with a production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which begins performances on November 22. A.R.T. audiences will remember Rochaix’s staging last season of Molière’s Tartuffe (with Alvin Epstein in the title role and Thomas Derrah as his willing dupe) and Rochaix’s epic staging in the previous season of all three plays of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in a new adaptation by Robert Auletta. An internationally known director, François Rochaix is an honorary director of the Norwegian National Theatre, where he has staged Ibsen in the playwright’s native language. He will bring his eclectic style and broad experience to bear on Robert Brustein’s American adaptation of the modernist classic.

Written in 1883 and 1884, The Wild Duck was a decisive transition piece in the development of one of the greatest playwriting careers of the modern era. The Wild Duck was written after a string of controversial “social” plays had made Ibsen notorious throughout Europe as a crusading reformer. The four plays immediately preceding The Wild Duck, in particular, had launched a new style of prose drama that identified Ibsen with various crusading “liberal” causes: The Pillars of Society (1877) exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of the typical bourgeois leading families; A Doll’s House (1879) revealed the tyranny of Victorian-era marriage; Ghosts (1881) attacked, through the taboo topic of syphilis, the folly of preserving “respectability” at the expense of the truth; and An Enemy of the People (1882) pitted private vested interests against polluters who threaten the health of the community. All four plays touched with uncanny insight on raw social issues that, more than a century after Ibsen introduced such subjects into serious social dramas, animate even our current presidential campaign.

But Ibsen was revolted by the role reforming liberals of his time were casting him into, and he wrote The Wild Duck in part to distance himself from the type of wild-eyed reformist idealism people were attributing to him. To one young idealist in the 1880s (he received many admiring and enthusiastic letters from young people throughout Europe) Ibsen wrote, “I have long ceased to make universal demands of people because I no longer believe that one has any inherent right to pose such demands.” He went on to be even more specific: “I believe that none of us can have any higher aim in life than to realize ourselves in spirit and in truth. That, in my view, is the true meaning of liberalism, and that is why the so-called liberals are in so many ways repugnant to me.”

One can imagine how crushing this reply may have been to the young poet who had written to Ibsen full of admiration and the desire to emulate the “liberalism” he saw expressed in Ibsen’s recent social plays. But Ibsen’s fans were to be equally baffled by the devastating portrait their champion painted in The Wild Duck of Gregers Werle, a neurotic idealist whose passion for “The Truth” wantonly destroys a stable family. The Wild Duck marks Ibsen’s shift from overtly social themes to the more personal and psychological “character plays” of his maturity.

The Wild Duck, written when Ibsen was 56 years old, begins the last major series of eight plays that closed the playwright’s majestic career. The A.R.T. has, in the past five years, staged two of these “Final Eight”: Hedda Gabler in 1992 and When We Dead Awaken (in Robert Wilson’s staging) in 1991. But The Wild Duck leads off the series, and it is interesting to see how Ibsen shifted the ground of his dramaturgy from incendiary social activism to self-examination and harrowing psychological revelation. By the time he composed The Wild Duck, Ibsen had achieved a practiced mastery over his art, and while continuing to use the stage in a seemingly “realistic” mode, Ibsen freighted his compositions with weighty symbolic ballast, representing the inner recesses of the psyche both in overt symbols (like the wild duck of the title) and in more subtle symbolic structures and stage devices. In our own late post-modern period, it is Ibsen’s symbolic structures — especially those to which he gave large visual form — that tend to guide both design and re-interpretation.

The Wild Duck tells the story of several victims of a successful industrialist, Håkon Werle, who — old and losing his sight at the time of the play — makes plans for an orderly retirement for himself and for his many wards. His embittered son, Gregers, has been nursing for many years a resentment he acquired from his now deceased mother, who, in her final years, suspected her philandering husband of having indulged in far more amorous affairs than he is likely to have consummated. But Werle has left a trail of complications in the wake of those sexual flings he did indulge in, and the most complex of these involves the family of one of his former business partners, the Ekdals.

Embroiled in a fraudulent scheme to cut timber on government land, Håkon Werle managed to implicate his business partner, Old Ekdal (once an army lieutenant and a celebrated hunter), and escape blame while Ekdal was disgraced and imprisoned. Ekdal’s son, the hapless Hjalmar Ekdal (and one of Ibsen’s most memorable principal characters), developed his pathologically low self-esteem (as we would call it nowadays) during his father’s imprisonment and changed from a bright and promising youth into a self-deceiving dreamer and habitual petty liar. Having once been Gregers Werle’s best friend and schoolmate, Hjalmar is invited to a dinner party at the Werle’s when Gregers returns home at his father’s bidding.

Gregers discovers to his horror that while he was away, his father’s housemaid, Gina Hansen — with whom the old man was rumored to have had an affair — has been married off to Hjalmar Ekdal. When Gregers further discovers that it was his father who set Hjalmar and Gina up in a small photography business, and that the couple have a fourteen-year-old daughter who, like his father, is losing her eyesight to a congenital disease, he concludes the worst: that his father has unloaded the servant he got pregnant on his unsuspecting schoolmate and thereby ruined the younger man’s promising life. After an angry confrontation with his hated father, Gregers makes it his business to tell the unsuspecting Hjalmar the truth about his contrived marriage and his illegitimate child, thus (as he imagines) rescuing the shattered Hjalmar from the callous machinations of his father. The fanatic and self-hating Gregers then enters like a virus into the tranquil but bizarre world of the Ekdals, and the play tells the rest of the story.

Though Ibsen invented a background story that is essentially a bourgeois melodrama, he was interested in the psychology of victims, and their own strange complicity in their doomed victimization. The Wild Duck as plotted by Ibsen is, as Michael Meyer (Ibsen’s best biographer and one of his many translators) put it, “a play dependent on, and held together by, a symbol.” That symbol is the wild duck of the title. It is assumed that Ibsen chose this wildfowl image after reading about the observed behavior of wild ducks in Darwin’s, where the animal is cited in particular for its characteristic of degenerating in captivity. The play itself describes another haunting attribute of wild ducks once they have been injured: “They always dive to the bottom as deep as they can get, and tangle themselves in the muck and seaweed, hanging on with their beaks to whatever they can find down there. And they never come up again.” This sort of behavior, extended metaphorically to people who have been injured by life, is what the play is all about.

In the play, the Ekdals harbor in their meager loft a strange fantasy realm, a miniature wildlife preserve beneath their eaves where they raise chickens; pigeons; rabbits; and a convalescing wild duck, shot in the wild (but not killed) by Håkon Werle himself. The doddering ex-convict, Old Ekdal (Hjalmar’s father), is the principal keeper of this interior parody of the open forests he used to roam in his prime. The Ekdals’ eerie private preserve is a sanctuary for lost creatures, in particular Hedvig’s adopted pet — itself a victim of Werle’s “sporting” habits, just as Hedvig is a product of the ruthless industrialist’s sexual predations.

The secret animal sanctuary is one of the oddest things in Ibsen’s play, but it is odd only if we cling to an outdated notion of “realism” as a constraining style. Ibsen had remained throughout his writing life unswervingly a poet, even when he switched to the colloquial prose dialogue that marked his mature style — the style that revolutionized European playwriting. But it is a mistake to think that Ibsen’s “realism” is anything other than a highly skilled poetic illusion. Henry James was one of the finest observers of what he referred to as “Ibsen’s admirable talent for producing an intensity of interest by means incorruptibly quiet, by an almost demure preservation of the appearance of the usual . . . ”

We have long since dispensed with “the appearance of the usual” in the contemporary theatre, and this tunes us admirably to the provocation of Ibsen’s deeper art. Contemporary artists like François Rochaix and his long-time collaborator, set designer Jean-Claude Maret are planning a version of The Wild Duck that emphasizes Ibsen’s spatial metaphors and the nested stage “realms” that represent the social and psychological forces at work on the lives of his invented creatures. Werle’s prosperous bourgeois interior, where an opulent dinner party is coming to a self-satisfied close, is the first “frame” Ibsen gives to the evolving action before moving us to the austere garret where the struggling Ekdals get by on Werle’s guilty charity and the meager earnings of Ekdal’s photography studio. This shabby eave-space, which many in Norway took to be an unflattering emblem of Norwegian provincial life, harbors a third and completely interior space: the secret “game preserve” within which the curious and disturbing psychological regression of the Ekdals (all but Gina) takes place. And this psychological disintegration is the real object of Ibsen’s scrutiny. He watches and records with unflinching persistence the gradual sundering and collapse of weak wills and weak characters unsuited to the buffets of life and the reversals dished out to them by a ruthless predator pursuing his own ends.

The women of Ibsen’s play are the strongest creatures in it. Gina Ekdal, her daughter Hedvig, and the accomplished Mrs. Sørby share among them a patient ability to indulge and cushion the follies of their men, be they lovers, husbands, or fathers. In the end, it is not a pretty picture that Ibsen paints, but he challenges conventional “bleeding-heart” liberal ideas about the virtue of simple folk and their presumed victimization by unfeeling industrialists.

Robert Scanlan is the Literary Director of the A.R.T.