The curtain rises on the garden of a sizeable house in a little fjord town in the northern part of Norway. The house is owned by the local doctor, Dr Wangel, who lives here with his second wife, Ellida, his first wife having died five years previously. Ellida is unsettled in her life with the doctor, however, partly because Ellida and Wangel have also suffered the heartbreak of the death of a baby son, and Ellida has not been well in the two years since. Wangel believes that Ellida’s unhappiness may stem from the fact that his two grown-up daughters have not welcomed her as a replacement for their mother. Ellida herself is preoccupied by a powerful romantic relationship she had in her youth that continues to haunt her. She becomes increasingly agitated as she confronts echoes of the trauma of that relationship, a trauma that now threatens to repeat itself, and to break her marriage.
This is Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, a play that frames a tortured domestic drama in the mystical language of Scandinavian folklore, including references to mermaids and drowned men returning to land, as well as the existential power of the sea itself. Ibsen wrote the play in 1888, and it premiered in Norway and Germany in early 1889. Having won global fame with his portrait of a broken marriage in A Doll’s House a decade earlier, the critics were bewildered by this strange new rendition of marital strife – one calling it “exalted lunacy”, nonplussed by Ellida’s mental hysteria and the play’s symbolic undercurrents.
I was prompted to explore the play after having seen the Australian maverick director, Simon Stone’s modern adaptation when it ran at the Bridge theatre in London in the Autumn of 2025. I am delighted to welcome back to the podcast, Professor Kirsten Shepherd, to help explore Ibsen’s watery classic. Kirsten is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University, and has appeared twice before on the podcast to talk about Ibsen plays, first with Ghosts in episode 74 and then for An Enemy of the People in episode 77.
Kirsten and I are joined by Tzen Sam. Tzen has just completed her PHD thesis at Oxford University on Ibsen’s first female translators, and edited with Kirsten a new volume of Ibsen plays published as an Oxford World Classic, that include new translations of A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken, as well as Men of Honour, written by Laura Kieler, who was the real-life inspiration for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
074 – Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
077 – An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
001 – A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
