Ibsen: Three Plays

'I'm going to find out – which of us is right, society or me.'

Henrik Ibsen's three great 'problem plays', A Doll's House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, challenged the conventions of nineteenth-century society and sparked a revolution in European theatre. Their female protagonists, Nora Helmer, Helene Alving and Hedda Gabler, continue to exert their power over modern audiences.

This volume brings together all three plays in sensitive and playable translations from the original Norwegian, along with a full introduction to Ibsen, his times and his work.

The Drama Classic Collections bring together the most popular plays from a single author or a particular period. They offer students, actors and theatregoers a series of uncluttered, accessible editions, accompanied by comprehensive introductions. Where the originals are in English, there is a glossary of unfamiliar words and phrases. Where the originals are in a foreign language, the translations aim to be both actable and accurate – and are made by translators whose work is regularly staged in the professional theatre.



Born in Norway in 1828, Ibsen began his writing career with romantic history plays influenced by Shakespeare and Schiller. In 1851 he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly established Norwegian Theatre in Bergen with a contract to write a play a year for five years, following which he was made Artistic Director of the Norwegian Theatre in what is now Oslo. In the 1860s he moved abroad to concentrate wholly on writing. He began with two mighty verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and in the 1870s and 1880s wrote the sequence of realistic 'problem' plays for which he is best known, among them A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm. His last four plays, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken, dating from his return to Norway in the 1890s, are increasingly overlaid with symbolism. Illness forced him to retire in 1900, and he died in 1906 after a series of crippling strokes.

Stephen Mulrine is a Glasgow-born poet and playwright who has written extensively for radio and television, and published many translations.

Kenneth McLeish was the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain and, until his early death in 1997, edited the NHB Drama Classics series.