Frode Helland. Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power.

Holzapfel, Amy

Frode Helland. Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power. Methuen Drama Engage. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. Pp. xiv + 272. $29.95.

Its both odd and slightly charming that most Germans think of Henrik Ibsen as German. As Marvin Carlson once observed, when Germans refer to the Norwegian dramatist they often do so by the endearing title of "Unser Ibsen" (Our Ibsen). According to Frode Helland, however, the Germans are not alone in their cooptation of Ibsen. In his expansive new study Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Culture Encounters and Power, Helland reveals how theatre-makers in Chile, Iran, China, Zimbabwe, and Egypt possess their own unique claims of kinship with Ibsen and his oeuvre. Investigating and unearthing such claims--by approaching them, in a Foucaultian sense, as always interwoven within culture--is a major undertaking of Ibsen in Practice. The book focuses chiefly on the "role that the state plays in the transmitting and shaping of ... Ibsens plays globally," which, in Hellands view, largely boils down to one of two ways: "sponsorship or censorship" (4). On a more perfunctory level, Helland's study provides extensive description and contextual analysis of major productions of Ibsen's plays across the (mostly contemporary) global north and south, providing an opportune sourcebook for researchers and scholars across disciplines, particularly those interested in the rapidly expanding worldwide phenomenon that might best be termed: #InterculturalIbsen.

Organized by case studies of productions of Ibsen's plays on four different continents, Ibsen In Practice begins with an introduction that clarifies its primary goal: "To chart some of the relational factors that influence the practice in the performances analysed" as part of a broader effort "to escape the mutually exclusive alternatives of internal interpretation and external explanation" (2-3). Helland is clear up front that he seeks to "emphasise the social and political production of 'Ibsen' as an ongoing process" (3) rather than as, presumably, a fait accompli. Helland also opposes treating Ibsen's plays as "original" or "source" (3) material (as is often done to Sophocles or Shakespeare), noting the importance of viewing them as Norwegian. As Helland stresses throughout the book, intercultural manifestations of "Ibsen" such as a Norwegian-Chinese Doll House or an Egyptian-Norwegian Peer Gynt are often only made possible through the financial backing of the State of Norway as part of its targeted cultural optics of "soft diplomacy" (5). Charged with keeping track of Norway's promotional agenda, as well as the political and cultural motivations of the various state apparatuses in which Ibsens plays have been produced, Ibsen in Practice assigns itself a rather Herculean task: to provide (in a sometimes encyclopedic manner) the intercultural contexts of each of the more than twelve productions it closely analyzes.

The book's first chapter, "Against Capitalist Realism: Thomas Ostermeier," boldly positions the contemporary German director as the "most influential Ibsen director today" (3). Positioning Ostermeier's versions of Ibsen, specifically the Berlin Schaubuhnes touring productions of Hedda Gabler and Enemy of the People, as neither post-dramatic nor "deep psychological portraits," Helland rightly characterizes them as "surprisingly traditional" (15). While Ostermeier's Ibsen is overtly critical of neoliberal capitalism, Helland argues, it evades a riskier or more powerful formalist intervention in Ibsens canon. With its panopticon-like revolving stage designed by Jan Pappelbaum and accompanying lounge-inspired Beach Boys soundtrack, Ostermeier's Hedda--whose titular figure is played neither as a romantic heroine nor as a "victim of social or psychological ills" but rather with a "beautiful surface appearance" (22) by Katharina Schuttler--becomes "a portrait of a generation and a social class" (24), striving to maintain higher social status under the threateningly austere policies of the Hartz IV era.

Likewise for Helland, Ostermeier's Enemy of the People, again designed by Pappelbaum--this time in a more Brechtian fashion to include three blackboard-covered walls on which the characters scribble and draw their fantasies, ideals, and slogans--accentuates how individuals under current economies of capitalism are turned into commodities, resulting in conditions of alienation. Providing a rich description of Ostermeier's ethical strategy of inviting the audience to engage, a la Augusto Boal's forum theatre, in a civic debate following Dr. Stockmann's famed speech, Helland suggests that the importance of the participatory portion of the production resides in "the shared experience of being manipulated, tricked and forced into submission" (38). (For the record, this reviewer found the civic debate part almost as gimmicky as Ostermeier's introduction of a slobbering German Shepherd on stage.) Tracking how audiences in Istanbul, New York, and other cities reacted in apathetic or confrontational ways to the interactive component, Helland hones in on the social potentialities of Ostermeier's productions, ultimately viewing them as "often even more open and pessimistic than Ibsens own" (46).

The book's ensuing four chapters examine how various countries--rather than single directors--have radically differed in their approaches to Ibsen's oeuvre, prompting readers to wonder if Helland might have included more German directors in his first chapter (Stephan Kimmig and Michael Thalheimer come to mind). In his second chapter, "A Doll's House in Chile: Dictatorship and its Aftermath," Helland surveys four productions that, each in its own way, utilized Ibsen's play to address "acute problems of life" (52) arising both under and in the decades following Chiles period of oppressive dictatorship by Augusto Pinochet. Through highly detailed and valuable descriptions of his chosen productions, Helland focuses particularly on the ways contemporary Chilean directors have approached A Doll's House as a feminist text and used the play to make pointed "critique[s] of Chiles bourgeois middle class" (57) as well as to bring "a precise Chilean topicality to broader global issues in Ibsens play" (75).

The third and fourth chapters of Ibsen in Practice--"Ibsen Under the Radar: Censorship and Artistic Expression" and "Three Chinese Dolls"--explore the unlikely blossoming of Ibsen productions under politically and socially repressive regimes in Vietnam, Iran, and China, focusing on the impact of censorship on plays that tend to be viewed as privileging individual liberty over social consensus. Drawn to looking at the ways restriction impacts artistic expression, Helland considers the use of marionettes in a production of Doll's House in Vietnam in 2006, the juxtaposition of documentary realism with surrealistic elements in the 1993 Iranian film Sara (a screen adaptation of A Doll's House), the construction of a narrative framing device for a production titled My Wild Duck in Iran in 2009, and the adoption of allegorical elements within a Chinese production of The Master Builder in 2006 as strategies for producing meaningful art under conditions of intense state scrutiny. Delving more deeply into China's reception of Ibsen, Helland next explores how three different productions of A Doll's House "constitute cultural exchanges" (120), relating them each to a discourse termed by the scholar Xiaomei Chen "Chinese Occidentalism" (121). Departing from the book's contemporary focus, the fourth chapter examines productions spanning over half a century, ranging from a highly authentic staging of A Doll's House in 1956 to an interculturally cast version of the play produced in Beijing in 1998 to a modern dance adaptation of the play in Beijing in 2010. While the writing can feel a bit dry at times, Helland's detailed and comparative descriptions of these productions contribute valuable additions to the historical record of the precarious global embrace of Ibsen.

In its fifth and final chapter, "Peer Gynt in Africa: Some Notes on the Dangers and Ambiguities of Interculturalism," Ibsen in Practice examines the strains and fissures that rise to the surface when Ibsen's plays are put into direct contact with "Western colonialism and its after-effects" (175). Exploring two productions of Peer Gynt that premiered in 2006--the first in Zimbabwe and the second in Egypt--Helland praises the former for its struggle to "give form to cultural tension between Ibsen's text, European culture, global tensions and local African reality" (188) while damning the latter for its attempt--despite being performed facing the Sphinx on the Giza plateau--to "ignore or transcend one's cultural self" (190). Following up on the "dangers and ambiguities of interculturalism" (200) in the book's "Coda: From Dhaka to Mabou Mines," Helland concludes his study by briefly reflecting on the contrasting degrees of cultural capital produced by two very different productions of Ibsen's works: a version of Ghosts performed by a local theatre troupe in Bangladesh in 2009 and Lee Breuer's critically esteemed experimental adaptation DollHouse, which premiered in 2003 at St. Ann's in Brooklyn and went on to tour in thirty-three different major cities across the globe. As Helland wisely points out, despite what may seem like vast differences in scope and reach, both productions "are equally provincial" when one considers them as "equally local to their cultural origin and background" (208).

With its trenchant analyses of productions of Ibsen's plays rather than his texts alone, Ibsen in Practice is not the first of its kind, of course. Studies such as Errol Durbach's Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production, Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker's Ibsen's Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays, along with other important works of criticism by Marvin Carlson, James McFarlane, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and Joan Templeton (to name a few), constitute an already impressive historical body of scholarship on the topic, a critical literature from which Ibsen in Practice seems to have distanced itself (strangely, none of these references or names appear in the book's bibliography). Nevertheless, Helland's ambitious study provides readers with rich and engaging "relational readings" of Ibsen productions across the globe, suggesting that Ibsen's oeuvre belongs not only to Norway and (apparently) Germany, but to Iran, China, Vietnam, Chile, Egypt, and Zimbabwe too.

AMY HOLZAPFEL

Williams College