On seeing the Stage Society's performance of Ibsen's "Lady from the
Sea," I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in
his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not
things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to
believe in, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for
instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the
footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the
performance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase,
a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's plays:
the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only,
we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls
to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the
sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited
freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has
talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes
seem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable
symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbs
over the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?"
and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in the
newspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its
meaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is,
but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if the
Stranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upon
a crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own and a
considerable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the
subconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of the
drama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable
way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory.