I Cards Flashcards
Eugene Ionesco
Romanian born, educated in France. Wishing to acquire English as his third language, Ionesco purchased a set of records produced by the Assimil conversation method and began to transcribe the short, simple-minded exercises they contained. Amazed by the strangeness of these nonsensical sentences, Ionesco made them the basis of his first play, The Bald Soprano.He went on to write more than twenty plays including Rhinoceros, The Chairs, Jack or The Submission, The Lesson, The Killer, Exit the King, Macbett, and Journeys Among the Dead.
Characters from The Bald Soprano: Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Mr. And Mrs. Martin, Mary the Maid, The First Chief
A Doll’s House
Henrick Isben: A Doll’s House
Set during the turn of the century between Torvald Helmer and his wife Nora. He treats her as if she was an animal, constantly calling her my little lark and any number of difference animals. He treats her as a doll or a small child. What he does not realize is that she has struck a bargain with Nils Krogstad for money when Torvald was sick. She must pay Krogstad back or he will reveal her deception. Her friend, Mrs. Linde, attempts to intervene, but to no avail. At the end of the play, Nora realizes that she has been living like a doll and leaves Torvald.
Is that my little lark twittering out there?
Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Papa’s doll child; and here the children have been my dolls. […] that is what our marriage has been.
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen was an extremely influential Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama. His plays were considered scandalous in much of society at the time, when Victorian values of family life and propriety were still very much the norm and any challenge to them considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen’s work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, which the society of the time did not want to see.
The Wild Duck
The Wild Duck is considered by many to be Ibsen’s finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals’ apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the “Summons of the Ideal”. Among these truths: Gregers’ father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary “invention”, his wife is earning the household income.
Hedda Gabbler
The action takes place in a villa in Kristiania (present-day Oslo). Hedda Gabler, daughter of an impoverished General, has just returned from her honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, an aspiring young academic – reliable but uninteresting. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him, and she fears she may be pregnant. The reappearance of her former lover, Ejlert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Løvborg, a writer, is also an alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda’s old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (who has left her husband for him), he shows signs of rehabilitation, and has just completed what he considers to be his masterpiece. This means he now poses a threat to Tesman, as a competitor for the university professorship which Tesman had believed would be his.
Hedda, apparently jealous of Mrs Elvsted’s influence over Ejlert, hopes to come between them. Tesman, on returning home from a party, finds the manuscript of Ejlert Løvborg’s great work, which the latter has lost while drunk. When Hedda next sees him, he confesses to her, despairingly, that he has lost the manuscript. Instead of telling him that the manuscript has been found, Hedda burns it, and encourages him to consider suicide . She tells her husband she has destroyed the manuscript to secure their future, so that he, not Løvborg, will become a professor.
When the news comes that Løvborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Mrs Elvsted are determined to try to reconstruct his book from what they already know. Hedda is shocked to discover, from the sinister Judge Brack, that Ejlert’s death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental. The judge appears to be blackmailing her. Leaving the others to discuss the situation, she goes into another room and shoots herself.
