By Mursi Saad El-Din This year marks the centenary of Henrik Ibsen's death, and the whole world seems to be celebrating. Last week a press conference was organised by the Ministry of Tourism and representatives of the Ibsen 2006 Fund of Norway, in which the granddaughter of the Norwegian playwright gave details of the celebrations. In Egypt, Ibsen's play Peer Gynt will be performed at the Pyramids on the 26 and 27 October 2006, and also at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. All proceeds of the two Pyramids performances will go to the children's Cancer Hospital Foundation. Although this issue is not the subject of my column, I cannot help raising the question why it is the Ministry of Tourism, and not the Ministry of Culture, that is organising this event. Setting aside the reasons for this mysterious state of affairs, I would like to give an account of my first encounters with Ibsen. I first came across his plays when I was a student in the English Department at Fouad Al-Awal (now Cairo) University. Two of the set books for the drama course were A Doll's House and The Wild Duck. To us students, it seemed a bit odd that two plays by a Norwegian playwright should be part of a course in English language and literature (incidentally, Chekov's Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya were also on the syllabus). Much later, I came to think of this as a good example that "Literature national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers", in the words of the PEN charter. Ibsen lived away from his country much longer than he lived in it. When at the age of 76 he returned to Norway after long sojourns in Germany, Italy and Denmark, he wrote to a friend "up here by the fjords is my native land [b]ut...where do I find my homeland?" Ibsen is regarded as the creator of modern realistic prose drama, gifted with technical mastery and penetrating psychological insight. Bernard Shaw created the term "Ibsenism", meaning a critique, in dramatic form, of contemporary morality. Ibsen's early plays show him as a man preoccupied with issues of morality and the evils of society. His play Pillars of Society demonstrates that the rich and powerful are often selfish and corrupt. Soon he was to write A Doll's House, a thoroughly well- made play in defence of women's rights and in that sense quite prescient. In Ghosts, Ibsen went further still, using the problem of congenital venereal diseases as a metaphor for moral ills inherited from the past which thrive in the dark and kill the present. Ghosts became a popular play, not only in Norway (where it initially had a hostile reception) but also in Paris where it was performed at the Theatre Libre, in Berlin where it was staged at the Freie Bukne and in London where it was performed at the Independent Theatre. After these three plays, Ibsen seems to have left behind his expressly social, moral concerns and turned to a more psychological, visionary and symbolic mode. Reading or, better still, watching Ibsen's plays, one senses his preoccupation with issues of truth and morality and his fascination with the ever- changing relationship between them. He was also obsessed with the chasm separating the old and the new, the past and the present. I would like to end with TS Eliot's words in his essay "Poetry and Drama," about Ibsen and Chekov. These two are "dramatists who have at times done things which I would not otherwise have supposed prose to be capable of, but who seem to me, in spite of their success, hampered in expression by writing in prose." Eliot believed that drama should be written only in verse!
