The Write Advice: CARTOON 002

© Charles M Schulz

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Think About It 031: DON MIGUEL RUIZ

Don't take anything personally.  Nothing others do is because of you.  What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream.  When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (1997)


 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Mexican physician, writer and Toltec spiritual teacher DON MIGUEL RUIZ:

 

http://www.miguelruiz.com/

 

 

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Words for the Music 011: KIRSTY MacCOLL

KIRSTY MacCOLL

10 October 1959 – 18 December 2000

 

 

 IN THESE SHOES?
KIRSTY MacCOLL
Live on Later With Jools Holland, 2000

from the 2001 Instinct Records LP  

Tropical Brainstorm

 

IN THESE SHOES?

 

I once met a man with a sense of adventure
He was dressed to thrill wherever he went
He said 'Let's make love on a mountain top,
Under the stars on a big hot rock'

I said 'In these shoes?  

– I don't think so'

I said 'Honey, let's do it here'


So I'm sitting in a bar in Guadalajara
In walks a guy with a faraway look in his eyes
He said 'I've got a powerful horse outside
Climb on the back I'll take you for a ride
I know a little place we can get there for the break of day'

I said 'In these shoes?  

– No way José'

I said 'Honey, let's stay right here'


No le gusta caminar
[Doesn't like to walk]
No puede montar a caballo
[Can't ride a horse]
Como se puede ballar?
[How can you swing?]
¡Es un escandolo! 
[It's a scandal!]


Then I met an Englishman
'Oh' he said 
'Won't you walk up and down my spine?
It makes me feel strangely alive'

I said 'In these shoes?  

– I doubt you'd survive'

I said 'Honey, let's do it' 



No le gusta caminar
[Doesn't like to walk]
No puede montar a caballo
[Can't ride a horse]
Como se puede ballar?
[How can you swing?]
¡Es un escandolo! 
[It's a scandal!]



No le gusta caminar
[Doesn't like to walk]
No puede montar a caballo
[Can't ride a horse]
Como se puede ballar?
[How can you swing?]
¡Es un escandolo! 
[It's a scandal!]



No le gusta caminar
[Doesn't like to walk]
No puede montar a caballo
[Can't ride a horse]
Como se puede ballar?
[How can you swing?]
¡Es un escandolo! 
[It's a scandal!]

 

 

Words and music 

K MacColl and P Glenister

© 2001 Ocean Songs/Chrysalis Music Publishing/

Warner Chappell Music Ltd

 

 

As someone who wasted a large part of his youth attempting to write catchy and literate pop songs I can only marvel at the talent and dexterity of the late and much lamented British songstress Kirsty MacColl.  While In These Shoes? may not rank as one of her of most iconic tunes, it demonstrates everything that made her such a beloved recording artist following her rise to prominence during the mid 1980s –– passion, wit and a flawless delivery combined with a devastating sense of humour.  (Her father was folksinger Ewan MacColl, whose compositions include The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Dirty Old Town, so it's probably reasonable to assume that adding words to melodies to create memorable, well-crafted songs was a gift she was born with.)

The hook of In These Shoes? is not, as it generally is in the majority of Western pop songs, the chorus which, in this case, surprises and then delights the listener by being delivered in Spanish.  Instead, the hook is the title itself, repeated three times with different tag lines which manage to be simultaneously provocative and hilarious.  This, the listener is warned, is not a woman to be trifled with.  This is a serious fashionista who knows men want her but will never compromise her 'look' to satisfy their expectations.     

Sadly, MacColl's life was cut short on 18 December 2000 when she was killed by a speedboat while scuba diving with her sons off the Mexican island of Cozumel.  The boat, owned by a supermarket tycoon named Guillermo González Nova, had illegally entered a restricted diving zone, travelling directly toward her at speed estimated by several witnesses to be in the vicinity of 18 knots per hour despite Nova's subsequent claim that it was only travelling at a speed of 1 knot per hour.  After saving the lives of her teenaged sons by pushing them out of the path of the boat, MacColl was sliced in half by its propeller, killing her instantly.  

Although Nova was the only one of the 6 people aboard the powerful 31 foot cruiser who was legally licensed to drive it, responsibility for the accident was shifted to Cen Yam, his 28 year old deckhand who eventually received a 34 month sentence for culpable homicide, not one day of which he served after paying a fine equivalent to the sum of £67.  Nova continued to insist that it was Yam and not himself who was in control of the boat when MacColl was killed –– a claim hotly disputed by the singer's mother Jean who waged a campaign, which was ultimately unsuccessful and ended in 2009 after she was advised that nothing more could be gained by pursuing it, to make him admit his guilt and issue an apology to the family.  (It is important to note that Jean MacColl did not ask Nova for financial compensation, only for the admission of wrongdoing plus the apology.)

What made MacColl's death particularly tragic was that it was not the inevitable rock star death caused by a surfeit of drugs and alcohol, triggered by some form of well-publicized and/or untreated personality disorder.  Hers was an unnecessary and entirely preventable death caused by a corrupt billionaire scumbag who bribed and lied his way out of having to pay the penalty for his grossly negligent behaviour, proving yet again that there's one law for the wealthy of this world and another law for the rest of us. 

Thankfully, we have the many recordings Kirsty MacColl made both as a solo artist and as an in-demand backing singer to keep her memory very much alive.  

Viva Kirsty!
 

 

Use the link below to visit Freeworld, the KIRSTY MacCOLL website, where you can read more about her music, her life and her enduring creative legacy:

 

 

http://www.kirstymaccoll.com/

 

 

 

The biographies Sun on the Water: The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Kirsty MacColl by JEAN MacCOLL and Kirsty MacColl: The One and Only by KAREN O'BRIEN were published in 2008 and 2013. 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

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Last updated 14 October 2021 §  

 

The Write Advice 101: KINGSLEY AMIS

The novelist's heroes, or central characters, are clearly meant to do more than just go round being close or distant relatives of him.  As between him and them in the first place, they are vehicles of his self-criticism –– an important function of poetry too.  By that very act of distancing, by projecting himself into an entity that is part of himself and yet not himself, he may be able to see more clearly, and judge more harshly, his own weaknesses and follies; and, since he must know that no failings are unique, he may be helped to acquire tolerance for them in others.  In the second place, if the novel comes off at all, the reader will perhaps accompany the writer in some parallel process of self-discovery.
      But that is still not enough; in an age that increasingly likes to view art as occupational therapy for the artist, it may even be too much.  What about the character working in the novel?  For me, the novel works on the character, at any rate rough-hews the character.  It is not the case that a fully-formed hero goes stalking about in search of situations in which he can be effectively arrogant or incompetent or spiteful or pathetic or even decent, though he may very likely fall as if by chance into a couple of such in the course of being written about.  The central situation comes first in every sense.

'Real and Made-up People' [Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 1973]


 

Use the link below to read 'Is Today's Literary Culture Macho Enough For Kingsley Amis?', a 2015 article posted in the online archive of The New Republic:

 

https://newrepublic.com/article/122584/todays-literary-culture-macho-enough-kingsley-amis

 

 

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The Write Advice 077: ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD

A Doll's House (1879) by HENRIK IBSEN

Penguin Classics UK edition, 2005

NORA:  It's true, Torvald.  When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion.  If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it.  He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls.  Then I came to live in your house ––– 

Translated by  

PETER WATTS

The Play:  On 21 December 1879 a recently published Norwegian play titled Et Dukkehejm [A Doll's House] premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in Copenhagen.  Opening just a few days before Christmas –– that most traditional of 'family' holidays –– the play scandalized its first night audience by offering it an unflinching depiction of a dysfunctional modern marriage in which a supposedly scatterbrained young wife is dominated and morally betrayed by her hypocritical and patronizing older husband.

What the play's first night audience found so confronting was not the situation itself –– a situation many no doubt would have recognized as being identical or at least reflective of their own marriages –– as much as the wife's unexpected and, for the time, unimaginable response to it.  After spending her life, married and otherwise, obediently accepting the idea of male superiority (and secretly resenting the men in her life for forcing her to be subservient to them), Nora Helmer decides to walk out on her husband Torvald and their three small children –– clearly the behaviour, in the eyes of a paternalistic and misogynistic society, of a woman suffering from some form of chronic mental illness.

Yet Nora is anything but deranged.  When the play begins she is shown as a sweet and dutiful young housewife, arms laden with parcels after returning home from a shopping expedition, grateful that she and Torvald finally have enough money, after years of strict economizing, to allow them to splurge on expensive Christmas gifts for their friends and family.  Torvald's initial response to his wife's extravagance is to tease her about it, calling her his 'little featherbrain' when she suggests they can always borrow money to pay their household bills until he begins earning the high salary he is due to receive in the New Year as the recently promoted manager of the local bank.  'But seriously, Nora,' he tells her before their terminally ill friend Dr Rank arrives to speak with him, 'you know what I think about that sort of thing… There's something constrained, something ugly even, about a home that's founded on borrowing and debt.'

Debt –– financial, social and moral –– is one of the central themes of A Doll's House.  Nora, it turns out, illegally borrowed money from an old school friend of her husband's, a man named Krogstad, to pay for a trip to Italy –– a trip that had to be taken to save Torvald's life after he became seriously ill as the result of stress and overwork.  Torvald knows nothing of this loan, believing the money for their journey was given to Nora by her father shortly before her father's death –– a belief which allows him to fire Krogstad who, after experiencing several personal and financial setbacks of his own, has become one of his employees.  

Krogstad's crime was to forge a customer's signature on a document –– a crime the self-righteous Torvald finds morally repugnant, never guessing that it's a crime his 'own little skylark' could ever conceive of, let alone be capable of committing.  (Under Norwegian law of the time, no woman was permitted to sign her name to a loan agreement without at least one male relative serving as her 'sponsor' and co-signatory.)  Rather than worry her father with such an unpleasant business while he was dying, Nora forged his signature on the document Krogstad gave her, unwittingly placing herself in an ideal position to be blackmailed.

 

Dover Thrift US edition, c 1970

 

The choice that Krogstad offers Nora is a simple one –– intercede with her husband on his behalf to ensure he retains his position at the bank or have him tell Torvald the truth about the money and what she did to obtain it.  Terrified of being exposed as a liar and a fraud, Nora pleads with her husband not to dismiss Krogstad and give his job to her poor, recently widowed friend Kristina Linde, only to have her pleas fall on deaf ears.  Nora, her husband says, should not concern herself with such matters.  She should focus on the ball they're planning to attend together on Christmas night, where he expects her to perform the tarantella, an energetic peasant dance she learned during the idyllic time they spent on the Italian island of Capri while he was convalescing.  

When Nora pushes him, begging him again to reconsider his decision, Torvald explains that it is impossible because, while he might 'at a pinch' have been able to forgive Krogstad's 'moral failings,' he cannot forgive him for undermining his authority by addressing him by his first name in front of his other subordinates.  When Nora accuses him of being petty and childish, Torvald responds by asking their maid to take a letter to Krogstad which, to her horror, turns out to contain her blackmailer's termination notice.

Having received this letter, Krogstad soon reappears at the Helmer home where he once again threatens Nora with exposure, this time demanding that she gain him a promotion in addition to having him reinstated.  'Inside a year,' he predicts, 'I shall be the Manager's right-hand man.  It'll be Nils Krogstad who runs the bank, not Torvald Helmer.'  Nora insists that her husband will never agree to this but Krogstad holds all the power now and, what is more, has no compunction about using it to destroy her unless she accedes to his demands.  He tells Nora that he has written her husband his own letter –– a letter he drops in their locked mailbox as he leaves the house.  But Krogstad, whose own life has been filled with enough trouble to understand and even sympathize to some degree with the damning position his attitude has placed Nora in, allows himself to be talked out of going through with his plan by her friend (and, it turns out, his former sweetheart) Kristina.  Krogstad offers to retrieve his letter, only to have Kristina reject the idea on the grounds that Torvald has a right to know what his wife did behind his back even if she did it, as she has so frequently insisted, in order to save his life.

Torvald, aroused by Nora's spirited (if desperation-fuelled) performance of the tarantella at the ball, brings her home early so he can have sex with her, only to have this plan foiled by the arrival of their fellow ball guest Dr Rank.  Eventually, however, he reads Krogstad's letter while Nora, her options non-existent as she perceives it, decides she must commit suicide because her actions have disgraced her husband and will make a laughingstock of him at the bank and throughout the town.

Penguin Classics UK edition, c 1990

 

With Rank gone –– and never to be seen again after confessing that he is not far from death –– Torvald lets fly at his wife.  'You've completely wrecked my happiness,' he tells her, 'you've ruined my whole future!… I'm in the power of a man without scruples; he can do what he likes with me –– ask what he wants of me –– order me about as he pleases, and I dare not refuse.  And I'm brought so pitifully low all because of a shiftless woman!'  Their marriage, he insists, can only be a marriage maintained for appearances' sake from this point on.  'You shall remain here in my house –– that goes without saying –– but I shall not allow you to bring up the children… I shouldn't dare trust you with them.'  Moments after making these grim pronouncements, a messenger arrives, bearing a letter for Nora which, when Torvald snatches it from her hand and opens it, turns out to contain the loan document, sent by Krogstad, bearing the forged signature of Nora's dead father.  Torvald is delighted and quickly changes his tune after burning this incriminating piece of evidence in the stove, telling Nora he forgives her while she, calm and self-possessed in spite of everything, removes her peasant costume to once again reveal herself as his 'poor, frightened, helpless little darling.'

But Nora is no longer the person she was before the evening began.  The silly girl she was when she arrived home a few days earlier, arms weighed down with Christmas presents, has been replaced by a wiser if sadder woman who confesses that she has never been happy with her overbearing husband, only 'gay' in order to please him and maintain the illusion that theirs has been a contented and mutually satisfying marriage.  'For eight whole years,' she tells the shocked Torvald, '–– no, longer than that –– ever since we first met, we've never exchanged a serious word on any serious subject… we've never sat down in earnest together to get to the bottom of a single thing.'  Torvald is astonished, unable to realize, or even comprehend, that his wife, his 'darling little skylark' can finally see him for what he is:  a spiteful, petty-minded narcissist incapable of caring for anyone but himself and a man, for this and other reasons, whose wife she no longer wishes to be.  Torvald, for his part, feels wounded and betrayed by her statements, reminding Nora that she has a duty to him and their children, only to be told that her primary duty, as she views it, is to be true to herself.  'I believe that before everything else,' she adds, 'I'm a human being –– just as much as you are… or at any rate I shall try to become one.  I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have warrant for it in books; but I can't be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what's in books.  I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.'  Torvald begs her not to leave, to at least let him write to her occasionally, but Nora refuses and, after suggesting that her coming back to him would be 'the greatest miracle of all,' walks out of the house, slamming its door behind her as she goes.

With that single courageous act, that one decisive slamming of a door, Henrik Ibsen virtually invented modern literary realism as we understand the term today.  Not only did A Doll's House horrify and disturb contemporary audiences –– so much so that Ibsen was forced to write an alternative, more 'hopeful' ending before the play could be performed in Germany –– it also paved the way for almost every other controversial yet similarly transcendent work of literature which followed it, including James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and North American playwright Eugene O'Neill's two towering dramatic masterpieces The Iceman Cometh (1940, first performed 1946) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941, first performed 1956).  The play continues to resonate with audiences because it addresses dilemmas that remain fundamental to the human condition –– to grow up or remain a child, to face reality or foolishly deny it, to educate yourself or live in the kind of ignorance that, while it may feel blissful for a time, can only end in a delayed but extremely painful awakening to the truth.  Nora is more than every woman who has ever been repressed, exploited and betrayed by her husband, just as Torvald is more than every man who considers it his right to treat his wife as his personal plaything, his 'doll' or puppet to be cossetted and patronized according to his whims.  They are oppressed and oppressor, victim and tyrant, locked in a struggle for control and self-determination that remains as old as time itself.

HENRIK IBSEN, c 1866

 

The Writer:  Like many a clear-eyed realist before and after him, Henrik Ibsen (20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) began his career as something of a fabulist, reinterpreting Nordic myths and fairy tales in verse plays like The Vikings of Helgeland (1857) and the popular epic Peer Gynt (1867).  It wasn't until 1869, with the performance of his first prose play The League of Youth, that Ibsen began to develop the realistic style for which he remains best known today.

Success did not come to Ibsen quickly or easily.  Although his parents, Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, were members of two of the wealthiest shipping families in the southern Norwegian port town of Skien, his father suffered disastrous business reverses when the future playwright was around seven years old which resulted in the family losing a substantial part of its fortune.  Forced to sell their city home to pay his debts, Knud Ibsen moved his family to Venstøp, its much smaller summer home on the outskirts of town.  It was in Skien that the future playwright attended school, doing so only sporadically until the age of fifteen when, with his father now legally declared bankrupt and no longer able to support him, he moved to the even smaller town of Grimstad where he began to study in earnest for the university entrance exam that he hoped would one day allow him to obtain a medical degree.
 
In October 1846 the eighteen year old Ibsen fathered an illegitimate child by a servant girl named Else Jendstatter –– a son he was legally obligated to support until the boy, who was christened Hans Jacob Henriksen, became a teenager.  It was also during his stay in Grimstad, before he went to Kristiana (now known as Oslo) to re-sit the university matriculation exam he had previously failed, that he wrote his first poems, began painting and produced his first work for the stage, a blank verse drama titled Catiline set in Ancient Rome.  This play was published in April 1850 under the pseudonym 'Brynjolf Bjarme' in a small private edition funded by his friend, benefactor and staunchest supporter Ole Schulerud.  (Like all of Ibsen's plays, Catiline was written in Danish which was the common written language of both Denmark and Norway.)

A second one-act verse play, titled The Burial Mound and published under the same pseudonym, was performed later that year in Kristiana but received little attention from the critics or the Norwegian capital's theater-going public.  By this time Ibsen –– whose feelings about obtaining a medical degree had always been ambivalent at best, an ambivalance reinforced by his continual failure to pass his matriculation exam and increased interest in supporting radical causes –– had given up on his plan to become a physician to devote himself full-time to writing.  Having earned a small reputation as a satirist and poet of unfulfilled promise, he was approached by Ole Bull, an internationally renowned violin virtuoso, and offered the job of director, producer and 'play provider' at his newly opened Norwegian Theatre in the western city of Bergen.  (This was the first theatre in Norway to feature specifically Norwegian works performed by exclusively Norwegian actors, making it a very important job at the time.)  Apart from an 'educational visit' to Germany in 1852 which introduced him to the work of Shakespeare, Ibsen would remain in Bergen until 1858, writing and publishing five more verse plays based on Nordic myths, before returning to the capital to become creative director of the well-established and well-attended Kristiana Theatre –– a post that unfortunately did not empower him to move beyond the light comedies and pastoral romances that were the prevailing theatrical fashion throughout Scandinavia and much of Europe at the time.

In June 1858 the playwright married Suzannah Thoresen, an artistically-minded young woman he had met in Bergen following the minor commercial success of his sixth play The Feast at Solhaug (1855) and had been engaged to since January 1856.  Their only child, a son named Sigurd, was born in December 1859.  (Sigurd Ibsen would go on to serve as Prime Minister of Norway between 1903-1905 and became instrumental in gaining his country its long desired independence from Sweden.)  Ibsen, along with Suzannah and Sigurd, relocated to Italy in 1864 –– a trip that marked the end of a four year 'dark period' that saw him lose his job, begin to drink heavily and struggle to write, all the while supported by his wife who remained, as she did throughout his life, his most consistent source of encouragement.

Cygnet Theatre UK, 2013

 

The trip to Italy began a period of self-imposed exile from his homeland that would endure for the next twenty-seven years and see Ibsen firmly establish himself as one of the world's most daring and controversial dramatists.  It was during his time abroad –– a period which saw him go from obscure regional playwright to major theatrical force in Germany –– that he produced Brand (1865), his popular 'mythic' satire Peer Gynt (1867, with incidental music composed by his fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg), The League of Youth (1869), Emperor and Galilean (1873, a play based on the life of Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate which he personally considered to be his most important achievement) and what were to be his earliest experiments in the stark theatrical realism that soon became his trademark –– The Pillars of Society (1877) and A Doll's House (1879).

The latter play, which in addition to becoming Ibsen's most notorious work also became his most successful, was inspired by the life of a friend named Laura Kieler, a young writer who asked him to help her find a publisher because she desperately needed money to allow her sick husband to be treated for tuberculosis –– a lung disease, also known as 'consumption,' which was usually fatal before the invention of antibiotic drugs made it possible to successfully treat and cure.  Desperate to save her husband's life, Kieler asked Ibsen to advance her the money she needed to pay for his treatment, thinking she would repay the playwright from the sales of her books, only to have Ibsen refuse her proposal, leaving her no choice but to forge a cheque in order to obtain the necessary funds.  Her husband discovered what she had done and had her briefly committed to a mental asylum, initiating divorce proceedings against her soon afterwards.  Although they later reconciled and Laura went on to find success as a writer of plays and historical novels, she was forever known as the inspiration for 'Ibsen's Nora' and felt hampered by it until her death, in her adopted homeland of Denmark, at the age of eighty-three.

But Laura Kieler was not Ibsen's only inspiration for Nora.  'A woman cannot be herself in modern society,' he noted in 1878 while living in Rome, '[since it is] an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.'  It was these beliefs, as much as the sad story of his would-be protégé, which inspired the play and helped to make it a revered text among Suffragettes and other proponents of the Feminist movement after it was translated into English by critic William Archer and published in London in 1889.

A Doll's House was followed by the equally controversial Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882) in which the hypocritical conduct of an entire community is placed under the microscope.  Ibsen's next work for the stage The Wild Duck (1884) –– an autobiographical piece concerning a young man who returns to his hometown after a period of self-imposed exile where he is reunited with a married friend who, in what had become his signature style, is shown to be living a life founded on destructive self-deception –– is often considered to be his greatest play and, despite the undisputed greatness of later 'psychological' works including Rosmersholm (1886, loosely based on the lives of his parents), The Lady From The Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), remains for many his most characteristic achievement.  These groundbreaking plays also paved the way for the work of other, equally 'difficult' dramatists including Anton Chekhov and Eugene O'Neill, allowing them to present audiences with their own, often shocking visions of damaged human beings struggling to recognize, accept and overcome their social, personal and moral limitations. 
 

HENRIK IBSEN, c 1900

 

The success of these works saw Ibsen elevated to the status of a national icon, an artist whose reputation made him the ideal candidate to become his country's international representative in both the theatrical and the political spheres.  In December 1869 he served as Norwegian envoy at the opening of the Suez Canal, while his seventieth birthday in 1898 saw widespread celebrations held in his honour throughout his native land.  Neither his fame nor his age prevented him from engaging in a series of short-lived affairs with a host of women much younger than himself, the most notorious of which he conducted with an Austrian girl named Emilie Bardach who spoke openly of their relationship and sought to profit from her association with the man who, by 1899, had come to be regarded as 'Norway's greatest tourist attraction.'

Ibsen's final play was When We Dead Awaken, a dreamlike piece he subtitled a 'A Dramatic Epilogue' which had its premiere at London's Haymarket Theatre in December 1899.  In March of the following year he suffered a series of debilitating strokes at his home in Kristiana which caused significant brain damage and robbed him of the ability to recognize or utilize any form of written language.  He lingered in this unhappy state until 23 May 1906, when, after displaying some small signs of improvement, he finally died after uttering what was to be his last-ever word 'Tvertimod!' [On the contrary!].  By now an iconic figure whose work had been translated into many different languages and performed all over the world, his loss was widely mourned by the artistic community in whose eyes he remained one of the 'founding fathers' of Modernism.  After the works of his idol William Shakespeare, A Doll's House remains the world's most frequently performed play, its most recent professional production –– featuring the controversial 'alternative' ending originally presented to German audiences in the early 1880s –– having opened in the UK in June 2015.  


Use the link below to visit the website of THE IBSEN SOCIETY OF AMERICA, an academic organization founded in 1979 for the purpose of studying and preserving the works of HENRIK IBSEN:

http://ibsensociety.org/

 

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Last updated 15 February 2021