> “theater of concurrence,” a genre whose practitioners take for granted that their liberal audiences already agree with them about everything
Bit of an ideological record scratch moment there, so I went to look for an "about commentary magazine" (there isn't one?) and an overview of their work: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/ which is clearly coming from a very ideological place.
Nonetheless the central thesis of the piece is sound; what was shockingly progressive now looks mundane, because society has changed.
> Therein, however, lies the source of our latter-day discontent with Ibsen, which is that the people who go to see serious plays today are no longer horrified by anything in A Doll’s House or Ghosts. To the contrary, they sympathize with Nora and her fellow transgressors, and this sympathy cannot help but diminish the impact of Ibsen’s work.
For similar reasons nobody reads Stendhal any more, Tolkein looks cliched and oddly paced if you are exposed to any modern fantasy before reading him, and landmark films like Citizen Kane and 2001 are entertainment only to very specific audiences.
Indeed, it feels rather like we're reading someone with an axe of their own to grind.
I'd like to see a little more justification for this:
« For him, the Victorian-era hypocrisy he decried was a manifestation of the power of the mob to stifle the imaginations of the handful of great men and women who were born to leaven the loaf. As he declares in An Enemy of the People: “The majority is never right….The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.” »
That seems to me to be a clear-cut case of dishonestly attributing the views of an unsympathetic (at that point in the play) character to the playwright.
Further, I think the author may be exaggerating Ibsen's lack of popularity these days (having to write things like « of the later works, only <list of six plays> continue to be widely performed » is a bit of a clue).
Coincidentally, just a couple of hours ago, I heard an interview of 'Ink' playwright James Graham talking about audiences expecting Rupert Murdoch to be presented as a straightforward villain.
One of the many excellent things about Ink was how it forced audiences to revise - rapidly - their notions of Murdoch, even if after the play, we were left to reflect on the corrupting effects of power.
Bit of an ideological record scratch moment there, so I went to look for an "about commentary magazine" (there isn't one?) and an overview of their work: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/issues/ which is clearly coming from a very ideological place.
Nonetheless the central thesis of the piece is sound; what was shockingly progressive now looks mundane, because society has changed.
> Therein, however, lies the source of our latter-day discontent with Ibsen, which is that the people who go to see serious plays today are no longer horrified by anything in A Doll’s House or Ghosts. To the contrary, they sympathize with Nora and her fellow transgressors, and this sympathy cannot help but diminish the impact of Ibsen’s work.
For similar reasons nobody reads Stendhal any more, Tolkein looks cliched and oddly paced if you are exposed to any modern fantasy before reading him, and landmark films like Citizen Kane and 2001 are entertainment only to very specific audiences.