A NEW IBSEN

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 236, 24 December 1927, Page 20

A NEW IBSEN

NORWEGIAN DRAMATIST RELATIVE OF GRIEG Has Norway at last got a worthy successor of Henrik Ibsen? asks the critics, and for the most part they answer in the affirmative, says a message from Oslo. The new dramatist is a young man of 25, Nordahi Grieg, a relative of Edvard Gx*ieg, who wrote the music to “Peer Gynt.” Mr. Grieg had his first book published last year, “The Ship Goes On,” and achieved considerable success. The novel has already been translated into nine languages. Last autumn he published a volume of poems and finished two dramas, one of which was presented at the National Theatre in Oslo and the other at the National Scene in Bergen, and both were successful. The drama presented at the National Scene in Bergen was called “The Love of a Young Man,” and was rather conventional, but that presented at the National Theatre in Oslo marks a definite break with the old scenic technique. The play is called “Barabbas,” with the description, “A drama of Palestine two thousand years ago, of China to-day, and of India to-mor-row.” There are no acts, and the drama develops through eight continuous tableaux. The drama is built round the eternal conflict between the Christian and the worldly conception of life, and takes as its starting-point the opposition of a conquered nation against her oppressors, Barabbas and Christ representing the contrasted types of reaction. Generally speaking, the gravest objection against the drama is that the persons are not human beings, but mouthpieces of abstract ideas. The presentation in Oslo was a great success.

The present intention is to open the new theatre in Melbourne in March with a Margaret Bannerman season, and to offer as the first play “Our Betters,” by Somerset Maugham. This was one of the successes of the Canadian actress in. London. “The Golden Calf,” a recent English production, will be another of the plays in which Miss Bannerman will appear in Austria.