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  • Published: 3 September 2020
  • ISBN: 9781787537071
  • Imprint: BBC CD
  • Format: Audio CD
  • Length: 14 hr 0 min
  • Narrators: David Threlfall, Samuel West, Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville, Harriet Walters
  • RRP: $95.00
Categories:

Henrik Ibsen: Nine full-cast BBC radio dramatisations





Powerful BBC radio productions of nine of Henrik Ibsen’s finest plays

Often described as ‘the father of realism’, Henrik Ibsen was a pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare.

Included in this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is relocated to 1879 India in Tanika Gupta’s Audio Drama Award-winning dramatisation, while the provocative and scandalous Ghosts is adapted by Richard Eyre, with the cast of his Olivier Award-winning Almeida Theatre production.

Also featured are vibrant dramatisations of Hedda Gabler, whose desperate heroine is trapped in a suffocating marriage; The Lady from the Sea, about a woman torn between security and passion; and An Enemy of the People, in which a whistleblower reveals an inconvenient truth and is vilified for it.

The casts of these stunning dramas include David Threlfall, Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville and Harriet Walter.

  • Published: 3 September 2020
  • ISBN: 9781787537071
  • Imprint: BBC CD
  • Format: Audio CD
  • Length: 14 hr 0 min
  • Narrators: David Threlfall, Samuel West, Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville, Harriet Walters
  • RRP: $95.00
Categories:

About the author

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born of well-to-do parents at Skien, a small Norwegian coastal town, on March 20, 1828. In 1836 his father went bankrupt, and the family was reduced to near poverty. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad. In 1850 Ibsen ventured to Christiania—present-day Oslo—as a student, with the hope of becoming a doctor. On the strength of his first two plays he was appointed 'theater-poet' to the new Bergen National Theater, where he wrote five conventional romantic and historical dramas and absorbed the elements of his craft.

In 1857 he was called to the directorship of the financially unsound Christiania Norwegian Theater, which failed in 1862. In 1864, exhausted and enraged by the frustration of his efforts toward a national drama and theater, he quit Norway for what became twenty-seven years of voluntary exile abroad. In Italy he wrote the volcanic Brand (1866), which made his reputation and secured him a poet's stipend from the government. Its companion piece, the phantasmagoric Peer Gynt, followed in 1867, then the immense double play, Emperor and Galilean (1873), expressing his philosophy of civilization.

Meanwhile, having moved to Germany, Ibsen had been searching for a new style. With The Pillars of Society he found it; this became the first of twelve plays, appearing at two-year intervals, that confirmed his international standing as the foremost dramatist of his age. In 1900 Ibsen suffered the first of several strokes that incapacitated him. He died in Oslo on May 23, 1906.

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