The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy in three acts by Oscar Wilde, first performed on February 14, 1895 at the St. James Theatre in London in a production by George Alexander. The title of the play is a play on words: "Earnest" means "sincere," while the first name "Ernest" plays a central role in the story.

[Allan Aynesworth, Evelyn Millard, Irene Vanbrugh and George Alexander
in the 1895 premiere]

A comedy in which the protagonists assume fictitious personas to escape burdensome social obligations. The play was written after the success of Wilde's earlier plays Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's main themes are the triviality with which institutions such as marriage are treated, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most popular play.

Two English gentlemen, Algernon and Jack, are bon vivants who devote their leisure time to pleasure. Algernon invents a sick friend named Bunbury so he can go to the country (a trick he calls "Bunburying"), and Jack pretends to have to take care of his dissolute brother Ernest so he can come to town.

[Original production, 1895
Allan Aynesworth as Algernon (left) and George Alexander as Jack]

Jack, who always pretends to be his brother Ernest when he is in town, falls in love with Algernon's cousin Gwendolen and proposes to her. Gwendolen says it is her life's goal to marry someone named Ernest. Algernon visits Jack's country home under the false pretense of being Jack's brother Ernest. While there, he falls in love with Jack's ward, Cecily. She, too, considers the name Ernest an absolute requirement for her future husband. Algernon's Aunt Augusta is absolutely opposed to her daughter's marriage to Jack after she learns that Jack is an orphan who was found as an infant in a carpet bag at London's Victoria Station. However, she agrees to her nephew Algernon's marriage to Cecily when she learns of their considerable fortune. Jack, however, will only give his consent if he can marry Gwendolen in return.

It turns out that Cecily's governess, Miss Prism, accidentally left Algernon's brother in a handbag at the train station many years ago. Eventually, it is revealed that the foundling Jack was that infant, and thus is Algernon's older brother. It also turns out that Jack was actually named after his biological father, Ernest John. Jack has been telling the truth all along without knowing it.

To explain: Jack is a slang form of John. So Jack becomes E(a)rnest John, the "truthful John" - a play on words.

[Gwendolen (Irene Vanbrugh), Merriman (Frank Dyall)
and Cecily (Evelyn Millard), in the original production, Act II]

While Wilde had long been famous for his dialogue and use of language, it has been said that he achieved a unity and mastery in Earnest that is unmatched in his other plays, with the possible exception of Salomé. While his earlier comedies suffer from an unevenness resulting from the thematic clash between the trivial and the serious, Earnest achieves a pitch-perfect style. Three distinct registers can be discerned in the play. The dandyish insouciance of Jack and Algernon - established early with Algernon's exchange with his servant - betrays an underlying unity despite their different attitudes. Lady Bracknell's formidable pronouncements are as startling for their use of hyperbole and rhetorical extravagance as for their disturbing opinions. In contrast, the speech of Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism is characterized by "pedantic precept" and "idiosyncratic diversion." The play is also full of epigrams and paradoxes. Although Wilde uses by now familiar characters - the dandy lord, the overbearing matriarch, the woman with a past, the puritanical young lady - his treatment is more subtle than in his earlier comedies.

Text of the play

Greatest Plays of All Time

'Tis Pity She's a Whore, by John Ford (1629-33)

This tragedy is not what the strange title might make you think, but a play about the love between brother and sister. The author never condemns this relationship: he simply presents it as an unstoppable force of nature. Moreover, the lovers are very pure, like Romeo and Juliet, and form a strong contrast to the vileness and corruption that surrounds them.

The play's open treatment of the unsettling subject made it one of the most controversial works in English literature. The play was revived early in the Restoration era (Samuel Pepys saw a 1661 performance at the Salisbury Court Theater), but it soon stopped being performed and languished for more than 250 years in the archives before being revived in 1923. It was omitted from an 1831 "complete" edition of Ford's plays. The offensive title has often been changed to something euphemistic such as "Giovanni and Annabella" or "The Brother and Sister." Indeed, until well into the 20th c., critics were usually harsh in their condemnations of the play; the subject matter offended them, as did Ford's failure to condemn his protagonist. As one critic wrote, "instead of stressing the villainy, Ford portrays Giovanni as a talented, virtuous, and noble man who is overcome by a tumultuous, unavoidable passion that brings about his destruction". Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars and critics have generally shown more appreciation of the complexities and ambiguities of the work, though the treatment of the main subject still is considered as "unsettling."

Annabella has no fewer than four suitors. One of them is a Roman military man, Grimaldi. Secondly, Annabella’s father Florio favors the nobleman Soranzo as a match for his daughter. Donado, a citizen of Parma, is pushing his dimwitted but affable nephew Bergetto to be Annabella’s husband. And on top of that, Annabella’s own brother Giovanni is in love with her - more than a normal brother should be.

Giovanni confesses his forbidden passion to Friar Bonaventura, but the man of the cloth doesn’t seem to be able to find the right arguments. The Church is great at punishments and scaring people, but not at intelligent debate with people who think for themselves.

When Isabella is found to be pregnant, she agrees to marry her suitor Soranzo to hide her condition, although there are doubts about his character. And indeed, Soranzo pursued a married woman named Hippolita, who then encouraged her husband Richardetto to head out on a dangerous mission from which he conveniently didn’t return. Once Hippolita was available, however, Soranzo was no longer interested. Now Hippolita is plotting her revenge against Soranzo. But she’s not the only one - her husband Richardetto didn’t die after all. He returns in disguise and has only one purpose (with the assistance from his naughty niece Philotis): to take down Soranzo.

Given the number of people after him, it is a wonder Soranzo manages to make it alive to the end of the play. He receives crucial support from his devoted servant Vasques, who takes up arms against Grimaldi, beds Hippolita, tricks Annabella’s loyal servant Putana into revealing damning information (and then puts out her eyes as punishment for the terrible acts she has willingly overseen and encouraged), wangles absolution out of the local Cardinal, and all in all proves to be Giovanni’s most dangerous adversary.

When Soranzo discovers Annabella's pregnancy, he confines her to her room and plots with Vasques to avenge himself against his cheating wife and her unknown lover. But it is also his birthday and a big party is hosted. Giovanni visits Annabella in her room and stabs her to death her while kissing her. He then enters the feast, at which all remaining characters are present, wielding a dagger on which his sister's heart is skewered (ugh!). Her father Florio dies immediately from shock. Soranzo attacks Giovanni verbally whereupon Giovanni stabs and kills him. Vasques intervenes, wounding Giovanni before ordering his henchmen to finish the job. So much blood streams down the stage, it almost drips down on the spectators. Following the massacre, the cardinal orders Putana to be burnt at the stake, Vasques to be banished, and the Church to seize all the wealth and property belonging to the dead (that is what the Church was waiting for all the time). Richardetto finally reveals his true identity to Donado and the play ends with the cardinal speaking of Annabella the words of the title of the play: "who could not say, 'Tis pity she's a whore?"

Of course, on the contrary, Isabella is not like that at all. She is a strong-willed woman who defies convention. Her brother Giovanni is in contrast an intemperate figure who puts momentary instinct before long-range planning. The play exhibits an eloquent and glowing sympathy for the lovers, despite the unlawful nature of their union - it is a study of the irresistible force of strong passion.

P.S. Peter Greenaway has said that the play provided him with the main template for his famous 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, but in fact besides the cruel revenge there is not much the two works have in common.

Full text, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Greatest Plays of All Time

The Changeling, by Middleton & Rowley (1622)

What struck me about the English plays of the Renaissance (written between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries) is the coarse language and general lewdness - in this respect, Shakespeare is a literary giant who really towers above his contemporaries. The Renaissance comedies are very rough and ready, like some Zaju plays of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty, and the tragedies are stuffed to the brim with gore, blood, and ugly murder. In other words, many of them are gothic camp. I wondered if there was anything worth reading, and came across The Changeling, interesting because it's so bizarre (and not at all politically correct, I'm afraid), about a woman who is in love with a man who is unfortunately not her fiancé. So she hires her ugly servant, who is in love with her, to kill her betrothed for the price of her own virgin flesh. The play also has a subplot involving madmen and fools in a private asylum run by a physically abusive profiteer, but unlike in the 17th century, we don't find mentally disturbed patients funny anymore. However, the chaos in the asylum is perhaps a fitting backdrop for the story of reversals, deceptions, and descent into madness.

[Thomas Middleton]

The word "changeling" in European folklore refers to a deformed or mentally retarded child believed to be the offspring of fairies, secretly substituted by them for a "normal" human child they had stolen. The original child could be made to return by torturing the changeling (in the hope that the fairies would come to rescue it) - a silly superstition which led to countless cases of child abuse. More generally, the term could also be used to describe a fickle person, someone pretending to be someone else, or an idiot.

The tragicomedy about the changeling also switches authors, as it was written by the duo of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. The play has two plots: a tragic main plot and a comic subplot. Scholars believe that Middleton wrote most of the main plot, while Rowley wrote mostly the comedic subplot.

The female protagonist of the play, Beatrice-Joanna, is a privileged Spanish lady, the daughter of the castle owner Vermandero. Vain and selfish, she is about to marry a gentleman named Alonso de Piracquo, a suitor supported by her father, but falls head over heels in love with Alsemero, a visitor to town whom she has just met by chance in church.

More interestingly, she is also possessed of an abiding hatred for a frightening, repulsive man, De Flores, her father's servant, who is madly and hopelessly obsessed with her beauty and continually follows her around offering his services. She constantly bullies him, clearly showing how much she hates his ugliness. When her father demands that she marry Alonso de Piracquo in a few days, she suddenly realizes that the hated De Flores might be useful to her after all - he is so blinded by love that he will do anything she asks of him.

De Flores is an interesting accomplice to his powerful but shortsighted mistress. He carries out Beatrice's crime out of a self-loathing devotion to her beauty and prestige. After he kills her fiancé and brings her the victim's finger with her ring on it, she thinks he will be satisfied with money and leave the country - instead he demands her virginity and blackmails her into a night with him. When she replaces her maid in her bed, she sets off a bloodbath and everything spirals out of control. Evil begets evil, and soon she must abandon all pretense of being the beautiful, innocent, and respectable gentlewoman she once pretended to be.

Although Beatrice detests De Flores, it is clear that she is also powerfully attracted to him, a sexually charged bond based on both repulsion and fascination. De Flores's ultimate triumph over Beatrice is both deeply horrifying and strangely satisfying - the manipulator manipulated. When the guilt of both is revealed, he stabs her to death and then commits suicide.

This is the terrible main plot of The Changeling. By comparison, the subplot, in which a man enters an asylum as a patient so that he can be near the doctor's beautiful young wife and declare his love for her (which is rejected because the woman is honest and sticks with her husband), is rather commonplace - nothing more than background noise.


I have read this play in the Penguin Classics edition of "Three Revenge Tragedies." The text of the play can also be found at archive.org.

Greatest Plays of All Time

Salome, by Oscar Wilde

It is probably impossible to separate Wilde's Salome from the great opera Richard Strauss based on it. Isn't it better to enjoy the opera (as I did) and leave the play alone? On the other hand, in the opera the music is in the foreground and it is often impossible to understand the words - so I found it interesting to read the play as well - in its quieter atmosphere it brings its own rewards.

When Wilde began writing Salome in late 1891, he was well known as a writer and critic, but not yet established as a playwright. Lady Windermere's Fan had been completed but not staged, and his other West End successes, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, were yet to come. He had been considering the subject of Salome since his undergraduate days at Oxford, when Walter Pater introduced him to Flaubert's story Hérodias in 1877. Biographer Peter Raby notes that Wilde's interest was further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau's paintings of Salome in Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours and by Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue's "Salomé" in Moralités Légendaires, and Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade. (Salome was indeed a fin-de-siecle phenomenon!)

[Salome dancing before Herod, by Gustave Moreau]

In 1892, the already legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt came to London, where she met Wilde and agreed to play the role. Wilde, who greatly admired the actress, accepted and rehearsals began. When the Lord Chamberlain, who was in charge of censorship, learned of this, he banned the production, citing an old law that biblical characters could not be portrayed on stage - and in Salome, John the Baptist (called Jokanaan) plays an important role. The ban on the play continued for a long time: the first production in England did not take place until October 5, 1931, at London's Savoy Theatre.

The English translation appeared in book form in 1894, with a cover design and ten illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. The play was next successfully produced in France, where the world premiere took place in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in prison. Germany and the United States soon followed.

[Salome with the head of Jokanaan, by Aubrey Beardsley]

The play went on to inspire several other artists. Most notably, Richard Strauss wrote the opera of the same name, using Wilde's text as the libretto in a translation by Hedwig Lachmann. The premiere took place in Dresden in 1905.

The legend of Salome comes from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark. Salome is the daughter of Herodias, who left her first husband and Salome's father to marry her husband's brother, Herod, King of Judea, because he was richer and more powerful. This marriage was considered illegal by contemporaries because Herodias' first husband was still alive; and because she had married her brother-in-law, it was also condemned as incestuous. One man who publicly criticized her was John the Baptist (Jokanaan), an ascetic and fierce moralist. He had been arrested and imprisoned by Herod, but the king was afraid to put him to death, as his wife Herodias demanded, because of John the Baptist's holiness and great popularity.

At Herod's birthday party, Salome is tempted to perform an erotic dance for her stepfather after being told that she can ask for anything she wants, even half of his kingdom. At her mother's instigation, she then demands the head of John the Baptist as her reward. A new element added by Wilde is that the sixteen-year-old Salome has a perverse attraction to John the Baptist. She shamelessly eroticizes the ascetic preacher's body and causes his execution when he spurns her affections. In the finale, Salome picks up John's severed head and kisses it, the height of decadence and necrophilia. Another new motif was that Wilde had Herod, already tired of Herodias, lust after Salome, his young stepdaughter and niece. When she dances naked for him, he is willing to give her anything she desires.

[Alice Guszalewicz as Salome in the Richard Strauss opera, c. 1910 (this photo has been misidentified as "Wilde in costume as Salome.")]

But in the end, when he sees her dancing with and even kissing the head of Jokanaan, Herod decides that Salome is monstrous and has her killed:

THE VOICE OF SALOMÉ

Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?... But perchance it is the taste of love.... They say that love hath a bitter taste.... But what of that? what of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan.

[A moonbeam falls on Salomé covering her with light.]

HEROD

[Turning round and seeing Salomé.]

Kill that woman!

[The soldiers rush forward and crush beneath their shields Salomé, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judæa.]

CURTAIN.

English text  | French text  |  Dutch text

Greatest Plays of All Time

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, by Pinero (1893)

Until today, I had never heard of the English playwright Arthur Pinero (1855-1934), even though he wrote nearly 60 plays and was considered one of the foremost British playwrights, with his period of greatest fame falling in the 1890s and first decade of the 20th century.

Pinero's "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social issues and made a star of the (then unknown) actress who played the title role. The play tells the story of the marriage of a "woman with a past" and how it fails because of the double standards of morality that Victorian society applied unequally and hypocritically to men and women.

[Arthur Wing Pinero]

The play opens with a late-night dinner between the respectable widower Mr. Tanqueray and some of his longtime professional friends. All are upper-class members of British society, and the friends are disturbed to learn of the impending second marriage of Aubrey Tanqueray (42) to Paula (27), a woman of "ill repute," or as the Victorians would put it, "a past. Modern readers must pause for a moment here, for it is easy to misunderstand. It doesn't mean that Paula is a reformed prostitute or anything like that, it just means that she had a few boyfriends and lived with one of them-something quite normal today. But the double standards of the 19th century wouldn't allow it. Paula also comes to visit later that evening, much to Tanqueray's surprise (for this also shows that she is a New Woman, as the term was used in the late 19th century), and she hands him a letter describing her past adventures. Tanqueray is a gentleman who wants a fresh start, so he throws the letter into the fire unread. But knowing how cruel society is, Tanqueray decides to move away from London to the countryside of Surrey, where he hopes to live a quiet life with his new wife.

Forget it. To begin with, rural society is even more hypocritical than the city, and disapproving neighbors ostracize the newlyweds. An even bigger problem is Aubrey's daughter Ellean, a priggish young woman who was raised in a convent after her mother's death and now comes to live with them. When the second act begins, a few months after the wedding, it is clear that the marriage has its problems. The Tanquerays are being shunned by their neighbors, and Ellean is distant from the second Mrs. Tanqueray, whom she doesn't accept as a new mother. All efforts to foster a bond between Ellean and Paula fail because Ellean remains cold. When the opportunity arises for Ellean to stay in Paris as the companion of an elderly neighborhood lady, Mrs. Cortelyon, Aubrey agrees in the hope that a temporary absence of Ellean will clear up the atmosphere. Of course, the opposite happens. Mrs. Cortelyon brings Ellean back earlier than expected, because while in Paris her companion fell in love with a young officer, Captain Hugh Ardale, and Ellean hopes that her father will allow her to become engaged to him. Unfortunately, stepmother and stepdaughter seem to have the same taste in men, for to her horror, Paula recognizes Hugh as a former lover with whom she once lived! Paula begs him to leave and confesses the truth to her husband. When Eilean learns why she can no longer marry Hugh, she denounces Paula.

And then something happens that ruins the play: the miserable Paula offers to give Aubrey his freedom, goes to her room and commits suicide... At this point, Pinero loses it. Having convincingly demonstrated that male promiscuity is condoned and the female version isn't, Pinero shows Mrs. Tanqueray behaving with an irrationality that seems completely out of character. It's as if the playwright, having raised a serious issue, wanted to satisfy his audience's desire for moral retribution - after all, in 19th-century literature, "promiscuous" women always had to die (Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Effi Briest, etc., etc.). Nevertheless, when the play was to be produced, many leading actresses refused to play the "scandalous" role of Paula, and such a play could not have been staged in England, say, five years earlier.

[Punch cartoon showing Pinero's relief as the second Mrs Tanqueray (Mrs Patrick Campbell) successfully leaps over a hurdle marked "Convention", followed by George Alexander as Tanqueray]

All the same, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was a sensational hit when it premiered in 1893, and its theme of the hypocritical standards held against women continue to resonate today - there are unfortunately still many cultures in the world where women are treated just as severely (or even much more severely) and unjustly as in Victorian England.

Text of the play at Project Gutenberg.


Greatest Plays of All Time

Romeo and Juliet, by Shakespeare (1597)

When the play starts, the 16-year old Romeo is already suffering from an extreme bout of love sickness - but for one Rosaline, as he still has to meet his Juliet. Apparently, he is a serial and obsessive lover, a hot-headed teenager who would profit from frequent cold baths. Instead, he gatecrashes a party at the Capulets, a family with which his own house of Montague is locked in mortal enmity. There he falls head over heels in love with the 13-year old daughter of the family, Juliet. After the ball, in what is now famously known as the "balcony scene", Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of the Montagues. The next afternoon they are already secretly married by Friar Laurence, who, hoping to end the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, disregards their very young ages and lack of parental consent. Such a priest is not an asset for the Church. Of course, nothing good comes of this hasty union...

[Juliet, by  John William Waterhouse (1898)]

I shouldn't be so cynical - Romeo and Juliet is the archetypal love story in the Western tradition and was, with Hamlet, Shakespeare's most popular play during his lifetime (and probably still is today). This type of tragic love story goes back to antiquity: in "Pyramus and Thisbe," from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the lovers' parents also despise each other, and Pyramus falsely believes his lover Thisbe is dead (eaten by a lion...) after which he kills himself with his sword. From there, a thick trail of bread crumbs leads via Dante, Da Porto and Bandello to Shakespeare.

The theme of fate looms large, but in this early Shakespeare play it is not set up according to the classical rules of drama: when skillfully used, tragedy must occur because of some character flaw, not a mere accident of fate, as here. Things start going wrong when Romeo refuses to fight a duel against Tybalt, Juliette's cousin, who has insulted him. His friend Mercutio then takes his place and is killed. Romeo then kills Tybalt to avenge Mercutio. As a result he is banished from Verona, under penalty of death.

Before leaving town, Romeo secretly spends the night in Juliet's chamber, where the teenagers consummate their marriage. But Juliet's father has decided that she must marry her long-time suitor Count Paris (he of course is ignorant of the fact of his daughter's secret marriage), and doesn't allow that already agreed-upon union to be delayed. Friar Laurence (who always makes things worse) offers Juliet a potion that will put her into a deathlike coma for 42 hours - this will help her escape from the marriage. On the night before the wedding to Paris, she takes the drug and, when discovered apparently dead, she is laid in the family crypt.

Romeo should have been notified about this trick, but the messenger misses him. Heartbroken when the news of Juliet's death reaches his ears, Romeo buys poison from an apothecary and goes to the Capulet crypt. He encounters Paris who has come to mourn Juliet privately, and in the ensuing fight, Romeo kills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, he drinks the poison. Juliet then awakens and, discovering that Romeo is dead, stabs herself with his dagger and joins him in the underworld.

After this terrible ordeal, the families are finally reconciled and agree to end their violent feud. The play ends with the lines: "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." But wasn't it just because of hastiness and bad advice? After all, I now for the first time realized that Romeo and Juliet were in fact still almost children... it is their extreme youth that gives gives the tragedy much of its force.

(Shakespeare himself married when he was 18, but such a young age was an exception. In some noble houses marriages were contracted at a young age, for reasons of property and family alliance (Juliet and Count Paris), but in fact the average age of marriage was quite old - for the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras it was 27. Young love in fact had to be kept in check as it could leave the lovers without subsistence or inheritance.)

[Balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet by Frank Dicksee (1884) - the lovers in this painting are much older than those in the play]

At least 24 operas were based on the play, and numerous symphonic works. The most interesting work is Roméo et Juliette, a "symphonie dramatique" by Berlioz, a large-scale work for mixed voices, chorus, and orchestra, which premiered in 1839. Romeo and Juliet is also one of Shakespeare's most-illustrated works. It is possibly also the most-filmed play of all time - I like the adaptation by Franco Zeffirelli (1968). Many other books, films and plays were inspired by Shakespeare, such as West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein. The story of the star-crossed lovers gave rise to a whole industry.

Text of the play at Project Gutenberg. I have read Romeo and Juliet in the edition of The Arden Shakespeare.


Greatest Plays of All Time

A Doll's House, by Ibsen (1879)

A Doll's House by Henryk Ibsen is often considered a feminist play about emancipation of women that contributed to the rise of the women's movement. It is the story of a woman striving for self-fulfillment by establishing her own individuality in a patriarchal society. The BANG with which Nora closes the door behind her as she leaves her husband reverberated through 19th-century society - and can still be heard today.

[Nora and Torvald]

Nora Helmer has been married to Torvald for seven years and is the mother of three children. But her husband treats her like a child herself, or rather like a cute doll (hence the title), making decisions without consulting her and not taking her seriously. The play opens during the Christmas season. Torvald has just been promoted to director of the bank where he works, but he pedantically reminds Nora that she should continue to live frugally.

Then Nora's former friend Christine Linde comes to visit. Nora and Christine have not seen each other for ten years, and they tell each other what has happened during that time. Christine has recently been widowed, and since her husband left her nothing, she is in need of an income and asks Nora to plead with her husband to get her a job at his bank.

Nora, in turn, tells Christine that years ago, unbeknownst to Torvald, she went into debt to pay for a foreign cure necessary for his health. She forged her father's signature to obtain that loan, and has been saving money from her household expenses for years to pay it back. But the lender, Krogstad, a former lover of Christine's, has just discovered the forgery. He demands the money back and sends a letter to Torvald. When Torvald reads the letter, he is furious and reproaches Nora severely. But not wanting to cause a scandal, he says he will take care of the matter.In the meantime, however, Christine has turned to Krogstad, the two fall in love again, and Krogstad returns the forged bill to the Helmers. When Torvald receives the paper, he burns it and forgives Nora, thinking that everything can go on as usual.

However, Nora draws her own conclusions from the whole affair. She realizes that Torvald has never cared about her, only his own honor and status. Suddenly he seems pitifully small to her. In the end, she decides to leave her husband and children, and the play ends with a bang as she closes the door behind her.

That bang caused a lot of excitement around 1880; there were even demonstrations for and against the play, not only in Norway, but all over Europe. A Doll's House has therefore been called one of the most influential works ever written. Nora's last words to her husband, "I must educate myself first, and you cannot do that for me...I have a duty too, equally sacred, my duty to myself..." have since become a rallying cry for the women's movement, focusing on women's self-realization and individuality.

A Doll's House is also a psychological drama about high expectations that are dashed. Nora expects a miracle - that her husband will be a knight in shining armor. When this does not happen, her world collapses and she is left on her own. She will have to fend for herself, and she is determined to do so.

Henryk Ibsen (1828-1906) was born and died in Norway, but spent nearly half of his life in Germany and Italy. Ibsen is the greatest Norwegian writer of all time, a giant of world literature, and the founder of modernist drama. He began writing plays at a time when there was hardly any theater in the Norwegian language, and the dramatic tradition in Europe was limited mainly to Romantic drama. Throughout his career, he transformed the idea of the modern stage and redefined the genre. By the time of his death, theater had once again become a literary genre on a par with novels and poetry.

Ibsen wrote twenty-five plays, usually divided into four periods: First, the historical and classical dramas of his early years; then the two great plays of the Rome-period (Brand in 1866 and Peer Gynt in 1867); then the plays of the modern Ibsen, in which he examines the social problems of the 1870s and 1880s (e.g. A Doll's House in 1879 and Ghosts in 1881); and finally the very retrospective tragedies of the end of his career (with Hedda Gabler in 1890 as a harbinger). There is a strong unity to his oeuvre, forming a chain in which each new work seems to emerge from the previous one.

The conflicting forces in Ibsen's plays represent the historical processes taking place in a rapidly changing society, such as the struggle between old morals and inevitable evolution. At the same time, they are part of less transcendental conflicts within the individual himself: the tragedies that oppose self-realization and the endless war between life and idealism.

English translation of the play at Project Gutenberg. I have read the translation by James McFarlane and Jens Arup in Oxford World's Classics (Ibsen, Four Major Plays).

Greatest Plays of All Time

Kurozuka / Adachigahara, author unknown

Kurozuka is the iconic horror story, a play of the fifth category of "demon plays." It features a kijo ("demon woman"), also called onibaba ("demon hag"), women who have turned into a demon as a result of karma and resentment. They often appear in Japanese legends, folktales, fairy tales, and performing arts. The story of the demon hag of Kurozuka has been retold in The Japanese Fairy Book by Yei Theodora Ozaki, and can be found at Wikisource, but as always in the case of folktales, there exist many variants.

Kurozuka, or the Black Mound, is a heap of large rocks in the grounds of Kanzeji Temple, just outside central Nihonmatsu (near Adachi station). Nihonmatsu is located in the Nakadori section of Fukushima prefecture, between the cities of Fukushima and Koriyama. Nihonmatsu's western border consists of the Adatara mountain range (1,728 m), one of Japan's "hyakumeizan" (100 famous mountains, as defined by mountaineer and author Fukuda Kyuya), while the Abukuma River runs through the eastern part. Nihonmatsu was part of ancient Mutsu Province and developed as a post station on the Oshu Kaido highway and as the castle town of the Niwa family, a 100,700 koku domain in the Edo period. Nihonmatsu Castle, also known as Kasumigajo Castle, is a historical site, although the castle was destroyed during the Boshin Civil War of 1868. But the grounds are famous for cherry blossom viewing as well as the Chrysanthemum Doll Festival in autumn, and the castle's main gate, Minowamon, has been rebuilt. There is a great panoramic view from the donjon on the top of the hill (after a steep climb!).

[Kurozuka, the Black Mound, in Kanzeji Temple, Nihonmatsu]

The Noh play Kurozuka (called “Adachigahara” in the Kanze school - "Field of Adachi" is the name of this area) tells the story of two priests who stop by the hut of the Onibaba in Adachi. They are mountain priests (yamabushi) from Nachi in Kumano (southern Wakayama), an ajari called Yukei and his companions, and are making a pilgrimage to the far northern provinces to ask for alms. When they arrive at Adachigahara, the sun has already set. The only dwelling they see, for miles around, is a shabby hut. A woman, who seems significantly aged, lives in the house. Although the ajari asks her for one night’s lodging, she declines his request, as it would be too embarrassing to have them stay in such a shabby place. But as they have nowhere else to go, the ajari implores her for help until she finally accepts his request.

Inside, the ajari sets his eyes on a spinning wheel and asks the woman to show them
how to spin thread. The woman sits down in front of the wheel and spins thread, while speaking about her loneliness when operating the spinning wheel. "I who was lowly born spin hemp into thread and twist thread until the middle of the night. The labor of living in this world is bitterly harsh." The woman laments her misfortune that she cannot free herself from her bitter karma in this uncertain world and describes the evanescence of life. Her narration sounds philosophical and it seems that she has found the truth of life.

[Kurozuka by Toriyama Sekien, 1781]

By now, the night has deepened. The woman announces that she must go out to gather firewood to keep off the cold and has her guests to promise her not to
look into the inner room of the house while she is out. After repeatedly cautioning them, she leaves for the mountain.

Curious, the servant of the priests disobeys the old woman's order and finds to his horror that the inner room is filled with the bones and rotting corpses of people: "...numberless corpses are piled up to the eaves. The floor is covered with pus and blood, and the room is filled with the stench of discomposing. The corpses are swollen, and the dead skin and fat are putrefied." The priests realize that the woman must be a man-eating demon, the one who has been rumored to reside at Kurozuka in Adachigahara, and they immediately flee the house.

As they are about to run away, the Onibaba returns in a rage, in her demon form, a horrendous transformation. This is played by the nochi-shite wearing a Hannya mask. Although she tries to catch and eat them, when the priests pray with all their strength, the ogre's powers are weakened and she vanishes in the night storm. The priests are able to escape through the power of their Buddhist prayers to the esoteric deities.

There is no explanation of the title, "Black Mound," in the Noh play. As the Kurozuka in Nihonmatsu is a heap of rocks (see photo above) in some versions of the legend the Onibaba lives not in a normal dwelling, but in a sort of cave dwelling - that is one explanation. The other is that after she was subdued with the help of Buddhism, her body was buried in a "Black Mound."

So far the plot of the Noh play Kurozuka. In my series "Haiku Travels" at this blog, I have written about the humorous haiku the 18th c. poet Kyotai wrote when he visited the Black Mound. I also provide the backstory of the old woman: the terrible experience that turned her into such a fearsome monster. Please read my article "Haiku Travels (1) - Kyotai and Nihonmatsu" at this blog.

In 1964, scriptwriter and director Kaneto Shindo made the film Onibaba based on an old Buddhist fable, which tells the tale of a woman who, jealous of her daughter-in-law, dons a mask and tries to scare the girl and stop her from meeting her lover. The woman fails because the daughter-in-law's love is much stronger than her fear of the supposed demon. As a punishment from Buddha, the mask permanently sticks to the mother's face. Read more about this wonderful film in the article Onibaba at this blog.

Unfortunately, there is no English translation yet of Kurozuka, but the Noh Plays Database contains not only a synopsis, but also a PDF with translated highlights. See here for detailed information about Kurozuka.

Kurozuka was many times adapted for the Kabuki; in 1939 it was made into a modern Kabuki dance drama.

Greatest Plays of All Time

Sotoba Komachi, by Kan'ami and Zeami

Ono no Komachi is an enigma. She was a woman who lived in Japan during the 9th c. Eighteen of her poems have been included in the early 10th c. anthology Kokinshu, which means she must have been active in court circles. Perhaps she was a lady-in-waiting who served the emperor or another member of the imperial family at some time probably around the middle of the 9th c. For the rest, we don't know anything about her, and all we have are legends - many legends - which can not be considered factual. Komachi must have appealed to the imagination - or rather, her poetry, because that is the genesis of much of the Komachi legend!

In legend she is renowned for her peerless beauty - she is described as one of the most beautiful women Japan ever knew (in one legend, the number of men who longed for her is given as 18,099, and letters proposing marriage came to her like falling rain). "Komachi" is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan and her name has been given to the Akita Shinkansen as well as to a variety of rice from Akita (one legend makes her a native of that northern prefecture, which is rather hard to believe). But as so often happens with beautiful people, she was also haughty and sometimes ill-treated her lovers. Perhaps because her poetry is all love poetry, legends abound of Komachi in love. There are also legends about her cruel treatment of her lovers, notably Commander Fukakusa (Fukakusa no Shosho), a high-ranking courtier. Komachi promised that if he visited her continuously for a hundred nights, then she would become his lover. He visited her every night, regardless of rain or snow, but died of exhaustion on the ninety-ninth night.

A third type of legend tells of an aged Komachi, forced to wander in ragged clothes, her beauty faded and her appearance so wretched that she is mocked by all around her, as "punishment" for her earlier mistreatment of her lovers. Yet another group of legends concern her death, her skull lying in a field; when the wind blows through the skull’s eye socket the sound evokes Komachi's anguish. These last two types, misogynistic as they are, belong clearly to the category of male vengeance.

And finally, we also have five beautiful Noh plays in the current repertory about Ono no Komachi (and several others which are no longer current). In three of these Komachi is an old woman, and these plays belong to the highest and most difficult to perform plays in all of the Noh theater, the category of "rojo-mono" or "Old Women plays." Here we will discuss one of them, Sotoba Komachi, "Komachi on the Stupa," a play which keeps a strong dramatic tension throughout.

[Sotoba Komachi]

In Sotoba Komachi, Komachi is a hundred years old, ugly, and mad, yet wise and witty. The play (by Kan'ami, the father of Zeami, but revised by the latter as happened with most early Noh plays) begins with an encounter between two priests of the esoteric Buddhist temples on Mt Koya and an old beggar-woman, lamenting how she was “lovelier than the petals of the wild-rose open-stretched / In the hour before its fall. / But now I am grown loathsome even to sluts”. She later admits that she is the famed waka poet Ono no Komachi.

The first half of the play focuses on a religious debate between Komachi and the Shingon priests. The priests find she is sitting on a fallen stupa and criticize her for creating bad karma - the stupa here is not a full-size tower but either a small, sculpted wooden stupa or a tall, slim wooden board meant to stand upright as a grave marker which has slid down into a leaning or fallen position. The stupa with its Sanskrit inscription is especially sacred to Shingon Buddhism as Kongosatta, who compiled the teachings of Dainichi, the Cosmic Buddha in Shingon, temporarily hid them in an iron stupa in southern India. What follows is a religious debate, in which the replies of Komachi (who takes the position of Zen Buddhism against the Shingon doctrine) are so quick and direct that the priests are forced to acknowledge her superior understanding of Buddhism. Komachi uses Zen-like sophistries to defeat the priests: “Nothing is real. Between Buddha and sentient beings is no distinction”.

The priests then lament in turn her loss of beauty. In the final sequence Komachi is possessed by the angry ghost of a former suitor, the above mentioned Commander Fukakusa. He had been tasked with visiting Komachi for 100 nights in order to earn her love, but had died on the penultimate one; and his frenziedly acting out of his cruelly thwarted struggles to win her love brings the play to a dramatic close, with Komachi finally seeking Enlightenment and release.

Komachi is a very difficult role, requiring great skill and stamina, which is only taken by an actor for the first time when he is at least in his fifties or sixties, and even then authorization from the head of the Noh school with which the actor is affiliated is necessary. It is an intense role in which the elderly actor playing an old woman, must also let the young and beautiful woman Komachi was in the past shimmer through. He also has to switch from the quick repartee in the religious debate, to the frenzy of Komachi's possession by the ghost of her lover, and finally show the serenity of her transcendence.

[Sotoba Komachi]

Because of its depth of content, this Noh drama was translated early on by the French missionary Noël Péri (1865-1922), and later by Waley, Fenollosa, and others.

Mishima Yukio published a modern version of Sotoba Komachi in Five Modern Nō Plays in 1956. Mishima sets the scene in a modern city park, and has Komachi, an ugly old woman, picking up cigarette butts. A poet criticizes her for interfering with lovers who meet in the park. But Komachi insists they know nothing about love, and gradually draws the poet into an imaginative experience in which he sees her as the very archetype of young female beauty. At the climax of the experience, he dies - so Komachi is still the sorceress, with the poet as the victim, like once the Fukakusa Commander.

Translation by Arthur Waley.

Also translated in Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600 by Haruo Shirane (Columbia) - this translation, by Herschel Miller, has extensive notes.

A third translation can be found in Ono no Komachi, Poems, Stories, No Plays by Roy Teele.

The play by Mishima has been translated by Donald Keene in Five Modern No Plays by Yukio Mishima.

Information about Sotoba Komachi at the Noh Database.

Also see my blog article Japanese No Plays in Translation.

Also see my translation of Ono no Komachi's poem that has been included in the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each anthology.


Greatest Plays of All Time

Atsumori, an anti-war play, by Zeami

Atsumori is a Noh play that demonstrates the silliness and sadness of war. Life is short already, why make it even shorter? A seasoned warrior who in battle has killed a young flute player, feels he has become a murderer, and disgusted with military life, has taken Buddhist vows to expiate his sin. In the Noh play, one of the most iconic from the canon, he returns to the site of the battle to pray for the soul of his victim and there meets the ghost of the young man he has slain. The ghost asks him to pray for the redemption of his soul which still clings to the earth. The priest promises to do so, and in their shared grief and mourning, they are no longer enemies.

[Atsumori]

Atsumori is a play of the second category of Noh plays, a so-called shura-mono or "warrior play." The protagonists of warrior plays are ghosts of those who have fallen in battle, and so part of the "dream" or "mugen" genre of Noh, where usually the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. Like many other warrior plays, Atsumori is based on a famous episode in The Tales of the Heike (Heike Monogatari). In the eleventh century two powerful clans, the Taira (Heike) and the Minamoto (Genji), contended for mastery. In 1181 Kiyomori, the chief of the Tairas, died, and from that time their fortunes declined. In 1183 they were forced to flee from Kyoto, carrying with them the infant Emperor. After many hardships and wanderings they camped on the shores of Suma, where they were protected by their fleet. But early in 1184 the Minamotos attacked and utterly routed them at the Battle of Ichi-no-Tani, near the woods of Ikuta (present-day Kobe). At this battle fell Atsumori, the nephew of Kiyomori. When Kumagai, who had slain Atsumori, bent over him to examine the body, he found lying beside him a bamboo flute wrapped in brocade. 

Taira no Atsumori was a sixteen-year-old of almost feminine beauty and he was also an expert on the Japanese flute. He possessed a great flute called “Saeda," which originally belonged to the Cloistered Emperor Toba. In other words, Atsumori was rather an elegant aristocrat than a true warrior, but circumstances forced him to don armor. His opponent Kumagai no Naozane is an uncouth warrior from the countryside in Eastern Japan. When Kumagai during the battle at the seaside sees a high-ranking warrior of the Heike alone at the seashore, he attacks and wrestles his enemy to the ground and removes his helmet. Kumagai then realizes that the soldier is a boy of only fifteen or sixteen years old - the same age as his own son. His first impulse is to spare the boy's life, but then he sees other warriors from his unit approaching and - not wanting to appear weak in front of his colleagues - strikes off the boy's head. He then notices a flute, a symbol of courtly elegance, hidden under the boy's armor. Carrying a flute into battle is evidence of the boy's peaceful, courtly nature as well as his youth and naïveté. Royall Tyler, who has translated "Atsumori" in Japanese No Dramas, focuses in his introduction to the play on the contrast between Atsumori, the young, peaceful courtier and flute player, and Kumagai, the older seasoned warrior with no real culture.

[Atsumori]

After killing the exceptionally young warrior, Kumagai is so horrified by the experience, that he renounces the world and takes the priestly name Rensho. He feels overwhelmed by the tragedy and realizes the uncertainty of life. The Noh play Atsumori is not about the battle, but addresses the Buddhist theme of the salvation of both the killer and his victim.

It takes place some years after the end of the Genpei War. The ghost of Atsumori, disguised as a grass cutter, is the shite role, and Kumagai, having become a monk and changed his name to Rensho (or Rensei), is played by the waki. Kumagai visits the old battlefield in order to pray for the soul of his victim, and ask forgiveness. The play begins with Rensho's arrival at Ichi-no-Tani, also known as Suma, a location which features prominently in a number of classic texts, and thus has many layers of significance. There Kumagai meets a flute-playing youth, a grass cutter, and his companions; he speaks with them briefly about fluting and about Atsumori before the youth reveals that he has a connection to Atsumori, and asks Rensho to repeat the sutra of the Buddha Amida ten times for the sake of Atsumori ("If I attain to Buddhahood, In the whole world and its ten spheres Of all that dwell here none shall call on my name And be rejected or cast aside.”). When Rensho recites the sutra in question, the man implies that he is the ghost of Atsumori and disappears.

Between the two acts, there is the usual interlude, in which a kyogen performer relates the background of the drama, in this case the story of Atsumori, Kumagai and the battle of Ichi-no-tani.

In the second act Rensho is reciting prayers for Atsumori, whose ghost (looking as he was on the day of his death, in his splendid uniform, and carrying a sword) now makes his appearance, played by the nochi-shite. Tied to the mortal realm by the emotional power of his death, Atsumori's ghost has been unable to move on. Atsumori (along with the chorus chanting for him) relates the tragic story of his final battle and death from his perspective, re-enacting it in dance form.

CHORUS
Buddha bids the flowers of Spring
Mount the tree-top that men may raise their eyes
And walk on upward paths;
He bids the moon in autumn waves be drowned
In token that he visits laggard men
And leads them out from valleys of despair.

ATSUMORI
Now the clan of Taira, building wall to wall,
Spread over the earth like the leafy branches of a great tree:

CHORUS
Yet their prosperity lasted but for a day;
It was like the flower of the Morning Glory.
There was none to tell them
That glory flashes like sparks from flint-stone,
And after,—darkness. Oh wretched, the life of men!

ATSUMORI
When they were on high they afflicted the humble;
When they were rich they were reckless in pride.
And so for twenty years and more they ruled this land.
But truly a generation passes like the space of a dream.

(from the translation by Arthur Waley)

After relating his death at the hands of Kumagai, the thought flashes through Atsumori's mind that he has come back to the world and that now he could take revenge on Kumagai/Rensho. But when he sees Rensho meekly praying for him, he realizes that the only salvation for both of them is to let go and stop being enemies. He asks that the monk pray for his release, and so the play closes on a Buddhist note: Atsumori finds peace and Enlightenment with Rensho, and they will be reborn in the same lotus paradise.

In this way, the play warns in a Buddhist sense against the danger of attachment: Atsumori has not moved on to Enlightenment because of his attachment to his killer, and for Rensho it is difficult to find Enlightenment without Atsumori’s forgiveness. Only when Atsumori starts seeing Rensho as a repentant priest and forgives him, and when Rensho in turn accepts this forgiveness, can both of them move on to Enlightenment.

[Juroku mask of Atsumori in the final part of the play]

Like many Noh plays, Atsumori privileges mood over plot, and yugen (mysterious beauty) is created through the poetic songs. The actors play in slow and choreographed movements to the music of Noh flute and drums. The shite is the central figure, the protagonist (Atsumori); when he returns in the final part as a ghost, he is called nochi-shite; the waki (Kumagai) is a supporting character, who helps the shite pursue Enlightenment.
 
The bay of Suma is associated in the mind of a Japanese reader not only with the Heike Monogatari, but also with the stories of Prince Genji and Prince Yukihira. For Genji, see my discussion of the Suma Chapter from The Tale of Genji; and for Yukihira, see my translation of Poem 16 in the Hyakunin Isshu, as well as more information about Suma.

Atsumori in The Noh Database.

Waley translation.

I recommend the modern translation by Royall Tyler in Japanese No Plays (Penguin Classics).

Greatest Plays of All Time

Takasago, A Noh Play for New Year, by Zeami (1363-1443)

Takasago, A Noh Play for New Year

"Takasago" is a Noh play of the first category, a celebratory "god play." As other plays in this category, there is little drama, but instead it is infused with a festive, auspicious atmosphere. The present play celebrates matrimonial love: the life of a elderly married couple and their longevity. As a symbol the play employs "Aoi no Matsu," twin pine trees, not only because the evergreen pine tree is a symbol of strength and longevity, but also because these trees grow from the same roots and lower trunk. "Aioi" has the double meaning of "to share a life," and also of "becoming old together."

[The elderly couple and the Takasago pines, by Kunisada]

Zeami, who wrote the play, found his inspiration in the Japanese Preface to the Kokinshu, the early 10th c. poetry anthology, and embodies the spirits of the pines as the characters of an aged man and woman, wearing the simple clothes of a peasant couple, who have a very harmonious marital relationship although they live far apart: the woman in Takasago in Harima (now Hyogo) Province and the man in Sumiyoshi in Settsu Province (now Osaka) - in the one location stands the Takasago Shrine and in the other the Sumiyoshi Shrine (Sumiyoshi is one of the most important Shinto shrines in Japan). Although separated by a great distance (about 90 kilometres), the spirit of the pine at Sumiyoshi pays nightly visits to his wife, the Takasago pine spirit, who lives on the coast at Takasago bay. Despite their hair white with age, the couple's bond gives them youthful energy and beauty. From the 17th century, the Takasago spirit as an old woman holding a broom and Sumiyoshi as an old man with a rake usually standing under an aged pine tree have been painted or represented as figurines and displayed at celebrations of long life and good fortune, such as New Year's or weddings.

And to take one more step, the harmonious relationship of the aged couple representing the evergreen pine trees is said to symbolize the flourishing state of waka poetry. After all, the Sumiyoshi deity was the supreme god of waka - thus we find many layers here.

[The Shinto priest and the elderly couple]

The story of the play is as follows. A Shinto priest (waki) from the Aso Shrine in Kyushu (the shrine honoring the huge Aso caldera) is passing by Takasago Bay, Harima Province, with his companions. They are on the way to Heiankyo (Kyoto) for their first visit to the Japanese capital. The pine standing at the inlet amid the mild spring breeze is so beautiful that it attracts their attention. An elderly couple (mae-shite and tsure) come and start to sweep under the shade of the tree. They tell the travelers about the origin of the “Aioi no matsu” (paired pines) on Takasago and Sumiyoshi Bays and describe the joy of leading a long life together as a couple. They then reveal that they are the spirits of the pine trees, invite the chief priest to Sumiyoshi, and disappear. In the second act, the priests also set sail on the high tide, and arrive at Suminoe (Sumiyoshi) after the spirits of the pine trees. The deity of Sumiyoshi (the nochi-shite) appears and gallantly dances the "Kami mai" (god dance) in celebration of a peaceful world, under the beautiful moonlight. "The music of a thousand autumns soothes the people, the music of ten thousand years extends life; the breeze of the Aioi pines, how joyous the sound of the breeze, how joyous the sound of the breeze..." On this auspicious note the play ends.

One of the ageuta from Takasago is regularly sung at wedding receptions. It occurs in the play when the priest and his companions at the beginning of Act 2 set out for Sumiyoshi, and the text consists of a geographical description of the voyage: "Takasago! Our light craft under all sail slips out with the moon rising, the flood-tide swells foam around Awaji Isle, thunder upon Naruo far behind us now, for we skim on to Sumiyoshi where we soon put in..." (tr. R. Tyler)


Also see Poem 34 in the Hyakunin Isshu about the Takasago pines.

Takasago in the Noh Plays Database (Synopsis and other data)

Translation of Takasago by Royall Tyler in Japanese Text Initiative


Greatest Plays of All Time

Private Lives, by Noël Coward (1930)

Ninety minutes listening to a bickering couple may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the dialogue in Private Lives is managed so cleverly, coming in waves of affection and fighting, the smallest things again leading to heated arguments, that I finally was won over. Moreover, the ending is very original. 

Private Lives is a comedy of manners about a divorced couple who, while honeymooning with their new spouses, discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel (Coward makes unashamed use of coincidence to kick-start the plot!). Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realize that they still have feelings for each other.

[Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence
smoking and "posing as mirror opposites"
in the Broadway production of Private Lives (1931)]

It was a good thing that playwright Noël Coward caught influenza when visiting Shanghai in 1930, and had to convalesce in Room 314 at the Cathay Hotel by the Bund (since 1949 the Peace Hotel, a big, old pile where I have also stayed once in a previous life). He spent the two weeks usefully by sketching out a new play, "Private Lives, An Intimate Comedy," and then completing the actual writing in only four days.

The lives in question are those of the young, wealthy divorcees Elyot and Amanda, who, following a volatile three-year-long marriage, have been divorced for the past five years. Their problem is that they both have rather large egos. They used to love each other passionately, but couldn't stop their arguments from getting out of hand. During their stormy marriage they always tried to outwit each other, arguing violently. They simply couldn't love each other without fighting constantly.

In the opening scene, both are newly married to the much duller partners Sybil and Victor, but by chance they are honeymooning in adjacent suites of a sumptuous hotel in Deauville, on the coast of Normandy in northwest France (Deauville with its marinas and seaside casino attracted many artists as well as "the idly rich"; it is known perhaps above all for its role in Proust's In Search of Lost Time where its is called "Balbec").

The somewhat naive Sybil, by the way, clearly lacks the strong character that Amanda has, and Victor is a rigid and ridiculously conservative figure - through him traditional male roles are in fact satirized. Victor and Sybil together look like a standard, traditional couple. In contrast, Elyot and Amanda are equals in all respects and are both a bit androgynous. Amanda is an independent modern woman with a short hairstyle, who suggests the jazz age and its freedoms. She enjoys popular music and likes to dance to songs from a gramophone. Her advanced views include a challenge to male sexual hypocrisy, for when Elyot remarks that "it doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous," she retorts "It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous" - in only 40 years, we have come a long way from a play like Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, in which a woman who was "promiscuous" in her younger years, is ostracized by society.

Elyot and Amanda separately beg their new spouses to leave the hotel with them immediately, but both new spouses refuse to co-operate and each storms off to dine alone. As the sudden meeting again fires the spark between Elyot and Amanda, they start regretting ever having divorced. Finally, they abandon their new spouses and run off together to Amanda's flat in Paris.

[Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward play the love scene
in the Broadway production of Private Lives (1931)]

The second act is laid in this flat and we spend the evening with the reunited couple. They have devised a code word "Sollocks" to stop their arguments from getting out of hand. They kiss passionately, and there is even a hint of a love scene which was nearly censored in Britain as too risqué. But they are still the same people and the new-found harmony cannot last. They start arguing violently again, mostly about insignificant and nonsensical things. Their argument escalates to a point of fury (also helped by the cognac that Elyot has rather liberally consumed), as Amanda breaks a record over Elyot's head, and he retaliates by slapping her face. Then at the height of their biggest fight, Sibyl and Victor walk in - they have finally located their partners and want to talk to them. But as Amanda and Elyot have locked themselves into separate bedrooms, such a discussion will have to wait until the morning.

The next morning, in the third and last act, we witness a series of farcical but emotionally chaotic interactions between the four characters. After meeting Sibyl and Victor, Amanda and Elyot start bickering again. It is then decided that neither of the new spouses will grant a divorce for a year, to give Amanda and Elyot time to confirm if this is really what they want. But tempers keep rising, and now Sibyl and Victor even begin to bicker with each other, defending their respective spouses. Amanda and Elyot realize therefore that Sibyl and Victor are as well (or as badly) suited to each other as they are. They forgive one another and sneak out, leaving the younger two together. As Elyot and Amanda silently tiptoe out, Victor and Sibyl have reached the point of mutual violence...

And then the curtain falls. The conventional ending we expect from the genre of romantic comedy - that of celebratory marriage - is given an ironic twist: Amanda and Elyot’s unstable reunion means a fresh set of divorces from the abandoned second spouses. This is a satisfying ending as Elyot and Amanda are again together, but also in the sense that  the virus has spread, for now we have two bickering couples!

The British author and actor Noël Coward (1899-1973) wrote more than 50 highly polished comedies of manners. His greatest work was done in the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s. As a person, he was known for his wit and flamboyance, and he carefully developed "a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise," as it was called. I already knew his work through Design for a Living (1933) in the film adaptation by Ernst Lubitsch (with Miriam Hopkins, Frederic March and Gary Cooper). A poet and a painter both fall in love with the same woman and the trio agrees to try living together in a menage-a-trois. This is a very gracious film, and I liked it better in fact than the play which I read later (as a play I liked Private Lives better). Also see my article "Forbidden Pre-Code Films" at this blog.


[This post contains parts edited from the relevant article at Wikipedia]

Greatest Plays of All Time

Hedda Gabler, by Ibsen (1890)

After emphasizing the importance of individualism in earlier plays such as A Doll's House, Ibsen shifted the balance by writing about the danger of too much self-assertion in Hedda Gabler. In this character study, we meet a woman named Hedda, a ruthless individualist married to a dull scholar, Jorgen Tesman. She is the daughter of General Gabler, a powerful man who always gave her everything she wanted. As the play opens, she and her husband have just returned from their long honeymoon, during which Tesman did nothing but collect material for his studies of medieval craftsmanship. There is a clear temperamental (and probably sexual) incompatibility between husband and wife - is that why Ibsen uses Hedda's maiden name in the title of the play instead of calling her by her married name? She is more her father's daughter than her husband's wife.

[Hedda Gabler (Netherlands, 1959)]

The play is set in Oslo (then Kristiania) at the Tesman mansion. The action takes place over a day and a half.

Hedda, the daughter of General Gabler, and her husband, Jørgen Tesman, have just returned to Kristiania from their honeymoon. Jørgen Tesman is a hard-working, pedantic man who has spent most of the six-month trip working on a book of cultural studies, the publication of which he hopes will earn him a doctorate and a professorship at the university. Hedda does not love Jørgen. She regards him with indifference; he has no sense of Hedda's femininity. She married him only because she hoped the marriage would secure her a respectable social position. Two paraphernalia kept by the couple symbolize their antagonism: a pair of old slippers given to Jørgen Tesman by two old aunts who raised him; and a pistol from General Gabler's estate, a dangerous "toy" of Hedda's.

Hedda realizes the futility of her marriage when she learns that Ejlert Løvborg is back in town. Løvborg and Hedda had an extremely tense and intense love affair several years earlier. Løvborg, a cultural scientist, had retired to the countryside as a tutor after bouts of alcoholism and was working on a successful book that had just been published with the help of the married Thea Elvsted. If the book is a success, Løvborg could become Tesman's professional rival.

Thea has left her much older husband and is pursuing Ejlert Løvborg. She visits Hedda and her husband. Hedda is jealous of Thea's obvious influence over Løvborg and tries to come between them. She cleverly exploits Thea's naivety, having helped Løvborg write his book as a "comrade," and elicits secrets from her about Løvborg's life in the country. Another visitor, Brack, a lawyer, tells Hedda's husband that Løvborg has already finished the manuscript for his second book. He has become a serious scientific rival to Jørgen Tesman.

Now Hedda sees that her hour has come. She is driven by the thought: "For once in my life I want to have power over a man's fate." Exercising this power over her husband does not interest Hedda; he has no value in her eyes. Løvborg, however, does. She persuades him to go to a party with Tesman and Brack. Løvborg, unable to deal with his unprocessed memories of his relationship with Hedda, decides to break his abstinence and get drunk. The celebration turns into a binge. Hedda knew that Løvborg's behavior would end in a social fiasco and the destruction of his career opportunities.
The next morning, a distraught Løvborg tells her that he is socially ruined and has also lost the manuscript of the sequel to his book. He tells his girlfriend Thea that he destroyed the manuscript. Symbolically, he has destroyed any connection to Thea. Hedda does not tell him that her husband found the manuscript and gave it to her for safekeeping. Instead, she encourages Løvborg's sense of hopelessness and hands him her pistol with the request that it be done "in beauty. She then burns the manuscript, referring to the relationship between Thea and Løvborg: "Now I burn your child, Thea! - Your child and Ejlert Løvborg's." She explains to Jørgen that she destroyed the manuscript to secure his and her future.

Ejlert Løvborg does not die a "nice death". He shoots himself in the stomach. The lawyer Brack has recognized the pistol as Hedda's, and with this knowledge he tries to blackmail Hedda. He wants her to become his lover. But Hedda does not want to risk a scandal. Since she is disgusted not only by life, but also by Løvborg's banal death, she decides to commit suicide.

While Hedda plays the piano loudly in the next room and the shot that ends her life is fired, Jørgen and Thea are already reconstructing Ejlert Løvborg's book from his notes.

Hedda Gabler is a play about powerlessness and insignificance. Hedda has no purpose in life; she has doubts about life. She suspects that there are opportunities for happiness on earth, but she cannot see them. "She lacks a purpose in life - and that torments her," was one of Ibsen's notes on the play. He also wrote: "Life is not sad - it is ridiculous - and that is unbearable".

Hedda Gabler is one of Ibsen's best psychological dramas. The play has been performed countless times around the world, and the title role of Hedda is still considered one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress.

The play has been adapted for the screen several times, from the silent film era onward. The BBC screened a television production of the play in 1962, with Ingrid Bergman (who is a bit too soft for the diabolic role), Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, and Trevor Howard, which is probably one of the best adaptations.

I have read Hedda Gabler in the translation by Jens Arup in Oxford World's Classics (Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays)

Online translation at Project Gutenberg.

[This post has been partly translated and edited from the relevant articles in the German and Dutch versions of Wikipedia]

Greatest Plays of All Time

The Government Inspector, by Nikolai Gogol (1836)

Nabokov has called The Government Inspector the product of Gogol's fancy in which his private nightmares are peopled with its own incomparable goblins. Gogol combined a love of the grotesque with the keenest power of observation. Is Khlestakov, the St Petersburg clerk mistaken for a high official, man's corrupt conscience made flesh? Or is this play a scathing portrait of Russian corruption?

The news that a government inspector is about to arrive incognito for a secret investigation reveals the depths of corruption and decay in a small provincial town.
The top officials, led by the mayor, react in shock, and a flurry of activities follows to cover up their various abuses and to clean up the city. The local judge usually accepts bribes in the form of greyhound pups; the physician of the hospital doesn't bother to cure the patients entrusted to him; the school superintendent presides over a bunch of drunks; the postmaster always opens everyone's letters; and the mayor pockets public money, allows violence among the constabulary and lets rubbish accumulate throughout the town.

[Gogol]

Then it is discovered that a suspicious young man from St Petersburg has arrived already two weeks ago and is staying in the town's inn. The dignitaries immediately conclude that this must be the dreaded government inspector. In reality, it is Khlestakov, an impoverished young civil servant from the capital on his way to his parents' estate - he has been stalled in the small town because he has run out of money. He has not paid any of his bills, but does everything on credit.

So the mayor and his cronies confuse this comical and insignificant dandy with the much-dreaded inspector. Soon the two parties meet. Khlestakov thinks he is about to be arrested because of the unpaid bills, and becomes furious. He shouts and complains that the food does not taste good anyway. The mayor is completely intimidated by this outburst and even more convinced that he is dealing with a real top government official. He calms Khlestakov down and when hearing he has run out of money, quickly slips him 400 rubles as a bribe. Khlestakov from his side at first is surprised at how very good-natured and generous the people of the town are, but then realizes that they must be mistaking him for someone else.

Eager to impress, the town's notables hope they’ve done enough to cover up the shoddy operation of their school, hospital, police station and court house – the latter was operating as a hunting lodge until they heard of the inspector!  Accepting generous bribes from the town officials, Khlestakov leaves them under their delusion and spins elaborate yarns of his life as a high-ranking government official. The Mayor offers his house for Khlestakov to reside in. The visitor accepts and starts flirting outrageously with Maria and Anna, the Mayor's wife and daughter. Getting carried away, Khlestakov even proposes to Maria.

Fortunately, on the advice of his more sober servant, he manages just in time to flee the city. This happens moments before the dignitaries, to their dismay, intercept a letter revealing Khlestakov's true identity. As the notables argue, the play ends with the announcement that the real Government Inspector is in town and that he immediately wants to speak to the mayor, whereupon the characters freeze on stage.

Based on an anecdote allegedly told to Gogol by Aleksandr Pushkin, this is a satire about human shortcomings, greed, stupidity and political corruption. The publication caused a stir and the play was adapted several times to get it performed effectively.


English translation at project Gutenberg. I have read the translation by Christopher English in Oxford World's Classics ("Plays and Petersburg Tales").

Greatest Plays of All Time

The Broken Jug, by Heinrich von Kleist (1808)

A comedy in blank verse, The Broken Jug is one of the most famous works by Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). It tells the story of Adam, a village magistrate who must judge a crime he has committed. The plot consists mainly of a court hearing, which is reenacted in its entirety and in natural time. What is being tried has happened in the past and is revealed only gradually. The play, like Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, is therefore a prime example of an analytical drama. Like the comedies of Shakespeare and Molière, The Broken Jug has a serious core and touches on the tragic in places.

The starting point for the play was a painting by Jean-Baptiste Geuze that Kleist saw in a friend's house in Bern: "La cruche cassee," which depicts a pretty girl holding a broken jug as a symbol of her lost virginity.

[The Broken Jug, by Jean-Baptiste Geuze (1771)]

Set around 1685 in the courtroom of Huisum, a fictional Dutch village in the province of Utrecht, the plot revolves around the titular broken jug, which belongs to a woman named Marthe Rull. She accuses Ruprecht, the fiancé of her daughter Eve, of breaking the jug in her house the night before. Ruprecht claims that a stranger broke into the house and escaped through a window, knocking the jug off the windowsill.

Clerk Licht catches Judge Adam in the morning as he is bandaging fresh wounds. Adam explains that he tripped getting up and fell against the stove. Licht doesn't argue, but suggests that he believes it was an erotic adventure of his superior in which a powerful rival got in his way.

Then court administrator Walter, a member of the judicial council, arrives in the village. He has been sent from Utrecht to check the court records and files. Adam panics, especially since his judge's wig has disappeared and there is no replacement. On top of that, it is court day and the plaintiff, the defendant and the witnesses are already waiting at the door. Walter demands to attend the trial, the inspection of the coffers and files will take place later.

Now Judge Adam, like King Oedipus of old, is forced to judge a crime he himself committed. But unlike the ancient hero, he knows this from the beginning, that the deed is an outrage, and that he himself is a villain. Accordingly, he does everything in his power to prevent the solution of the case, in which, in addition to the jug, a betrothal has (almost) been broken.

The way he tries to hide his guilt by conducting the trial in a way that defies all rules of judicial impartiality, by influencing and confusing the witnesses, sometimes with threats, sometimes with sweet words, is most comical. Like a snake, he twists and turns to divert suspicion to others, which exposes him to contempt. Sweating with fear, however, he is cornered, which allows human compassion to sprout. The flourishing imagination with which he invents new excuses makes him almost sympathetic at times.

But court administrator Walter and clerk Licht are not blinded by this. Both are interested in solving the case, but for very different reasons. Walter is interested in reforming the administration of justice in the countryside, while Licht wants to become a village judge himself. Step by step, the trial reveals the following facts: the unknown person who hastily escaped through Eva's bedroom window on the eve of the trial, knocking the jug off the ledge, was him, Judge Adam himself. It was neither the defendant, Eve's fiancé Ruprecht, nor his alleged rival Lebrecht, nor even the devil, as the witness Mrs. Brigitte, who examined the scene of the crime together with Licht, claims.

The circumstantial evidence speaks a clear language: there are the two head wounds Adam suffered when Ruprecht twice banged the broken door handle over the head of the unrecognized fugitive - the jealous man had previously kicked in the door and literally stormed the chamber. Then there is Adam's club foot, which of course explains the trail in the snow from the crime scene across the village to the judge's house. Finally, there is the missing judge's wig: Mrs. Brigitte proudly places it on the table; it got caught in the vine trellis under Eve's bedroom window.

Now Walter advises the judge to resign, the dignity of the court is at stake. But Adam will not listen. All right, says Walter, then he should put an end to it and pronounce sentence. In the ensuing uproar, Adam decides that Ruprecht should go to jail for disobeying the court. Now Eve steps forward and admits for the first time that it was Adam who was in her room last night and who broke the jug on his escape.

This finally makes room for the full truth: Adam lied to Eve that her fiancé was threatened with military service in the East Indies, from which, as is well known, only one man in three returns. So he blackmailed his way into her chamber. Even at the time of the trial, Eve feared that Adam's blackmailer had the power to snatch her fiancé away from her. Therefore, she remained silent for a long time about what really happened.

Although Eve does not explicitly state that Adam did not seduce her, Ruprecht is ashamed and begs her forgiveness for calling her a "harlot. However, there was already a shadow of jealousy over the relationship before Adam's interference. Ruprecht has asked Eve if she has had any contact with his rival Lebrecht, but she does not give a clear answer and only turns the accusation around. The night before the trial, Ruprecht sneaks into Eve's house. His suspicions are confirmed when he does not find Eve alone. However, he does not reveal himself, but hides behind a bush in order to witness what happens between Eve and her unknown visitor - he even feels a voyeuristic "lust".

Walter assures Ruprecht that his conviction will be overturned, Ruprecht and Eve reconcile, and Eve gives Ruprecht a kiss. The wedding can take place, Walter has done something to improve the administration of justice, the ambitious Licht becomes the new village judge, and punishment awaits old Adam. Only the jug is not repaired, much to the annoyance of Eva's mother, the plaintiff Frau Marthe. She had been so eager to accuse Ruprecht of the crime because anyone other than the fiancé in Eve's bedroom would have destroyed the good reputation of her child and her house. But the pitcher was also dear to her. At least she described it in detail at the beginning of the trial, together with the recent history of the Netherlands (the fight against Spain) depicted on it, and thus immortalized it.

The village judge Adam is more than just a lecherous old man, a stock figure in the comedy of all ages. It is not for nothing that he is called "Adam" and the seductive young woman who is his counterpart is called "Eve". The play is thus about a "second fall" in which man sits in judgment on his own guilt. Just as Adam, the first man, falls victim to his pride in wanting to "be like God," the village judge Adam also falls victim to vice, in his case lust, which leads him (apparently not for the first time) to want to "fall into a bed. The village judge Adam is also expelled from his "paradise" (the office of judge and the prosperity associated with it). According to the motif of the "second fall", Eve must also have "sinned", and indeed it is obvious that much more than just a glass was broken during her rendezvous with the old judge.

German text at Wikisource and at Project Gutenberg.

Greatest Plays of All Time


[This post has been partly translated and edited from the relevant article in the German version of Wikipedia]