‘Oh really! There’s no end to all these comings and goings!’
(Hjalmar Ekdal accurately summarising the busyness of an Ibsen play)

The backstory is carefully concealed and takes two acts to leak out but it is this: a generation ago Old Ekdal and Haakon Werle were in business together. Something happened whereby Old Ekdal was sent to prison, to do hard labour, and emerged a broken man, whereas Werle went on to become a business tycoon, managing a booming timber company. The play starts 20 or so years later and focuses on the sons of these two men, Hjalmar Ekdal, Old Ekdal’s son (who has become a photographer and lives in shabby poverty with his uneducated, former-serving girl wife Gina) – and rich old Werle’s son, Gregers Werle, who has grown up in a wealthy household but has a yen to improve the world. Feeling guilty for his unspecified role in Old Ekdal’s fate, Werle has given broken old Ekdel a sinecure of a job ‘copying’ papers which helps keep the Ekdal household afloat, but otherwise keeps him hidden away like a shameful secret…

Cast

• Werle – merchant, factory owner and so on
• Gregers Werle – his son
• Mrs Sörby – Werle’s housekeeper who he plans to marry

• Old Ekdal, broken, alcoholic fantasist
• Hjalmar Ekdal – Old Ekdal’s son, a photographer
• Gina Ekdal – Hjalmar’s wife
• Hedvig – their daughter, 14 years old

• Dr Relling – a doctor who lives downstairs from the Ekdals
• Molvik – a former theology student who lives downstairs from the Ekdals

• Graberg – book-keeper to Werle
• Pettersen – servant to Werle
• Jensen – hired waiter

Act 1

A grand dinner at Werle’s house which he is giving for his son, Gregers. The pair, father and son, don’t get on and only communicate via business letters. Werle is cross that Gregers invited his old schoolfriend Hjalmar because it took the number of guests to unlucky 13. We are introduced to two or three of the guests who are portrayed as fat and greedy (and named only as types – the bald guest, the fat guest, the short-sighted guest) although it is also repeated that they move in ‘Court circles’, strongly suggesting the ambience of wealth and influence which old Werle operates in.

The play starts in a studiedly indirect way: instead of going straight in with the main characters we are shown below-stairs chat between Werle’s servants, gossiping about the old man, about his reputation for being a lad when he was young and about the fate of Old Ekdal, hiw one-time business partner who ended up in prison.

The main events in Act 1 are:

1. Gregers talks to his old school-friend Hjalmar who he hasn’t seen for years and discovers that a) his training as a photographer was funded by Werle and b) Hjalmar married a former servant woman at the Werle house, Gina Hansen.

Interrupting this, Old Ekdal himself appears, he’s been working late with a colleague named Graberg the book-keeper and, the other gates being locked, the only way the pair can exit is via the living room where the grand party is happening. Old Ekdal’s appearance is like Banquo’s ghost, all the guests fall silent as he shuffles across the room and his own son, Hjalmar, turns to the fireplace in order to ignore him. Shame all round…once he’s gone conversation picks up and Mrs Sörby promises to play the piano to entertain the guests.

After interacting badly with the rich sophisticated guests (very pointedly he is made not to understand the idea that ‘vintage’ wines are older and more valued), Hjalmar makes his apologies and leaves. The other guests are being entertained by Werle’s housekeeper Mrs Sörby in the back room, which allows for:

2. A confrontation between Gregers and his father in which all kinds of things come out:

• it was Werle who set Hjalmar up as a photographer, out of guilt at ruining his father
• around the same time Werle fixed up for Hjalmar to marry the former maid Gina and this was because…
• Gina was just the latest female servant Werle had been carrying on with, then tired off and so dismissed from his service, sent her home to live with her mother, but engineered her marriage to Hjalmar
• Werle’s wife, Gregers’s mother, knew all about her husband’s infidelities and told Gregers

As to why Werle has given this whole party for his son, and invited so many outsiders, Werle says he wants to make Gregers a business opportunity, he wants to bring him into the family firm as a partner. But Gregers discerns the Machiavellian scheme beneath this – Werle is going to marry his housekeeper Mrs Sörby and so he set up this party because … he wanted to present a respectable face to the important people in his community – this is why the guests Gregers doesn’t know are at ‘his’ party, because it’s nothing to do with him, it’s to do with his father wanting to put on a show of happy father and son and, by implication, of his son happily accepting his (Werle’s) forthcoming marriage to Mrs Sörby. A tableau for public consumption.

Werle has, typically, used his son, as he always has, and as he always used and betrayed his mother. Gregers is beyond angry, he overflows with contempt for his father, who feels it.

In their final skirmishing Werle renews his offer of a partnership in the business but Gregers turns this down, revealing that he has just discovered a new purpose in life. The rest of the play reveal that this purpose is to save and redeem the much-abused Ekdel family…

Act 2

The setting switches to Hjalmar Ekdel’s photography studio, which is also the main room for Hjalmar and Gina. It’s the same evening as Werle’s dinner. Gina is sitting with their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig. Their conversation is designed to show how poor they are, not illiterate peasant poor but scrimping to make ends meet. Gina talks about the high cost of butter and both are thrilled that they’ve managed to let their spare room which will bring in a bit of extra money.

(Apparently, in the original language Gina’s speech is littered with grammar mistakes and malapropisms i.e. getting words mixed up, to indicate her lack of education, though English translations struggle to convey this.)

Old Ekdal appears with a bundle of documents to copy and shuffles across to his room. Although he tries to hide it Gina and Hedvig realise he’s got a bottle of booze. Years in prison broke him. He is an alcoholic.

Hjalmar arrives, he shows off some of the knowledge he acquired at the party (the banter about vintages) which impresses the girls but Hedvig had been telling Gina how excited she was because he promised to bring her something, but he forgot. He rummages around for the menu from the party to give her but Hedvig can’t help crying with disappointment.

Then Gregers arrives. He is rather shame-faced in front of Gina. His polite enquiries reveal that Hedvig is 14 and Gina and Hjalmar married 15 years ago. I think we are meant to deduce that Hedvig is old Werle’s child i.e. the old man got his serving maid pregnant, sent her home to her mum, who then engineered for her to be married off to the naive Hjalmar.

When she is out of the room fetching their guest a beer, Gina and Hjalmar also reveal that Hedvig has a degenerative disease of the eyes. They haven’t told her but a doctor has confirmed it. When Hjalmar says the doctor said it was hereditary Gregers starts in a way that suggests he realises it was inherited from his father. As in Ghosts, the implication seems to be that sexually transmitted infections are hereditary, which is incorrect. The symptoms of an STI such as syphilis would only be passed to Hedvig if the mother, Gina, had them but here she is apparently right as rain.

The act ends when, as part of telling them about the apartment, Gina and Hjalmar mention that there’s a spare room they want to let out. Now in fact, before the men arrived home, Gina and Hedvig had been gleefully celebrating that they’d managed to let the room and would thus be generating family income but had agreed not to tell Hjalmar till the following day. The result of this decision is that Hjalmar doesn’t know the spare room is let and when Gregers asks if he can have it, Hjalmar promptly says yes, although the girls look at each in mortification.

But the most important part of the act is when Old Man Ekdal insists on letting Gregers into their secret – this is that the entire back part of the loft, which they reveal by rolling apart two sliding doors, is a kind of menagerie: it contains hutches for rabbits and hens along with loads of pigeon roosts.

And Old Ekdal proudly displays his latest acquisition, a wild duck which was shot by Gregers’s father during a shoot, which was winged and fell into the lake and down into the water but was rescued by a plucky hunting dog. They took it back to Werle’s grand house where it didn’t thrive to Werle ordered it killed but his servant, Pettersen, who we met in Act 1, is friendly with Old Ekdal and saved it and passed it on to him. And now it’s been given pride of place in a special manger, here in the Ekdal attic.

Act 3

Same scene, the main room at Hjalmar Ekdal’s which is to be the setting of all the remaining scenes. Next morning. Hjalmar is grumpily getting on with touching up the most recent photographs. He snaps at Gina who has booked a couple to come and have their photo done. It becomes plain that he is a difficult man to live with, partly because he feels the weight of so many responsibilities.

Gregers and Hedvig: Gregers finds himself alone with Hedvig and finds out more about her, discovers that Hjalmar has stopped her going to school (because of the strain on her sight, though she doesn’t know that), promised to home school her but hasn’t found the time. Instead she helps out round the house and spends her spare time in the back room which, besides being a menageries is a lumber room full of old books which she loves to read or rather gaze at the pictures. Hjalmar realises she is a sensitive child full of untapped potential.

Gregers and Hjalmar: a lengthy exchange in which Hjalmar reveals that he doesn’t like photography and leaves most of that to Gina. His heart lies in his inventions. Some of this is tinkering, for example making not just the sliding doors which partition off the menagerie but also a kind of curtain which can be raised from the floor. He also likes stripping down, oiling and fixing his father’s antique rifle. He is, in other words, good with his hands, not with the aesthetics of photography.

And it’s now that Hjalmar reveals to Gregers he’s working on a marvellous invention which will restore the good name of the Ekdel family name. It’s only commitment to this project which keeps his head up above all these ‘petty things’ i.e. the shabby life he is forced to lead. We don’t get any detail about the invention but a strong feeling that Hjalmar is bonkers.

He also has a pistol, in fact to Gregers’ alarm he fires it in the menageries then, realising Hjalmar is here, emerges to explain that he indulges his father’s whim and fantasy that he is a still a proud lieutenant in the army. He places the gun on a shelf telling Hedvig to be careful with it as it still has a round in the chamber.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to instantly suspect that a loaded gun, on a stage, must inevitably go off. From this point onwards the only question is who is going to get killed.

In fact talk of the gun triggers a monologue explaining how brave and proud Lieutenant Ekdel was in his prime, a hunter of bears, a commander of man but reveals that when he was sentenced there was a moment when he was alone with his pistol and put it to his head but… failed to pull the trigger. And then, even more upsettingly, tells Gregers about the time that he, Hjalmar, the son of a disgraced army officer, crushed by circumstance, also held the gun against his breast, but also bottled out – despite all his ill fate, determined to live (p.166).

Trying to make light of all this, Gregers says there’s something of the wild duck about Hjalmar, what with being shot and winged, and mauled by a hunting dog and plunged down to the depths of a lake. He continues the metaphor, telling his friend he is living in a poisoned atmosphere, a swamp (from which Gregers obviously means to save him) but Hjalmar becomes offended and asks him to stop (p.167).

Lunch. Gina has invited to the two men who live downstairs, Dr Relling, a doctor, and Molvik, formerly a student of theology. Lunch is, of course, the setting for several further revelations. Just as the two guests from downstairs are greedily tucking in, Old Ekdal emerges from the loft with a fresh rabbit skin, announcing that he’s just killed, skinned and salted a rabbit. Tender-stomached Molvik makes to vomit and rushes out the room.

But the main revelation is Dr Relling telling everyone that, when he was young, Gregers used to go among the cottages of the labourers up at his father’s works preaching about ‘the claim of the ideal’. In other words, Gregers is an inveterate idealist, preacher and saver of souls. This adds depth to his attempts to heal the Ekdel household.

Hjalmar has just offended everyone, especially Gina, by telling them he doesn’t like the poisonous atmosphere, when there’s a knock at the door. Just as in ‘An Enemy of the People’, the set is busier than Piccadilly Circus.

To everyone’s surprise it is the villain of the piece, old Håkon Werle. He asks to see his son in private so the others vacate the stage. Werle asks Gregers if there’s any chance of his returning home or accepting the partnership in the firm to which his son, inevitably, says No. What does he expect to achieve here? To open Hjalmar’s eyes to the truth. And does he expect Hjalmar to thank him for having his eyes opened?

Lastly the father asks his son if he’s going to return up to the works? No, he regards himself as having quit his employ. How is he going to live? Oh he has a few savings which will last as long as it takes. This exchange strongly confirms the sense that Gregers is going to carry out his mission then kill himself.

His father leaves, the other characters re-enter the stage and Gregers invites Hjalmar for a walk, he has a few things to tell him. Both Relling the doctor and Gina tell him not to go but Hjalmar asks what possible harm could there be?

Well, the audience realises, the vast harm of having the bottom ripped out of his world.

Act 4

Later the same day, Gina had handled the appointment with the couple who wanted to be photographed and is getting anxious about Hjalmar. He arrives home and is a changed man. Gregers has foolishly and selfishly told him everything. For a start he forgets that it’s his daughter’s 15th birthday tomorrow. When she mentions the wild duck he rashly says he wishes he could wring its neck which reduces her to tears. He hugs her and sends her off for her evening walk.

This allows Hjalmar to confront Gina with all the lies she’s told. She clarifies that she didn’t sleep with Werle when she was in her service, it was afterwards, when she’d gone back to live with her mother and her mother encouraged her to in order to make money. So Hedvig is old Werle’s child.

One last point: Gina has always done the household accounts so Hjalmar’s never realised how much money Werle contributed to them, allegedly pay for Old Ekdal’s copying work. Hjalmar thought he was supporting his family but turns out even this is a lie.

Gregers, in his idealistic stupidity, knocks and comes in expecting to find a scene of seraphic sweetness and light so is disappointed to find the couple in deep gloom. Gina curses him. Relling the doctor comes in, quickly learns the situation and warns them all that it’s the children who suffer most in broken marriage.

At which point there’s another knock on the door and it’s Mrs Sörby. She’s come to say goodbye because she’s going up to the works at Höidal because she’s getting married to old Werle. They all react surprised but Dr Relling reminisces when they knew each other when they were younger. At least Werle won’t beat her up like her first husband, now dead. Gregers toys with telling his father his new wife once had a thing for Dr Relling but Mrs Sörby says she’s told her husband-to-be everything about her past, no secrets at all.

She reveals she will be a useful housemeet to Werle considering that he’s going blind. Now we see the genetic link between Werle and Hedvig.

Hjalmar now invokes the same stupid idea Dr Relling accused Gregers of peddling to the labourers, ‘the claim of the ideal’, and in this spirit announces to Mrs Sörby that he pledges to pay off the entire ‘debt of honour’ i.e. all the money Werle has given to his household under cover of paying Old Ekdal. This is, obviously, a stupid and impractical thing to do.

Re-enter Hedvig who is girlishly excited because she met Mrs Sörby going out who gave her an advance present for her birthday, a letter. When she shows it the others realise it is addressed in Old Werle’s hand. Hjalmar opens it and it is a splendid gift from old Werle; that Old Ekdal need do no more work but will be awarded a pension of 100 crowns a month and when he dies, this sum will pass to Hedvig! Hedvig is, of course, thrilled and says she’ll give it to her mummy and daddy and asks why they aren’t happy.

Gregers asks Hjalmar what kind of man he is and, in effect, goads him until Hjalmar calmly tears the letter in two. He then asks Gina why the old man encouraged her to marry him and Gina reluctantly explains that Werle expected to be able to call by and shag her after her marriage. Hjalmar asks Gina point blank whether Hedvig is his child and she says she doesn’t know.

Hjalmar says he can’t stay in the same house a moment longer. Gregers says he must stay in order to win through to ‘that sublime mood of magnanimity and forgiveness’ which he is so obsessed with promoting, like all zealots, like all interfering busybodies.

Hedvig comes out of the kitchen as Hjalmar prepares to leave, he refuses to hug her, she clings on to him screaming, he can’t bear it, pushes her away and walks out. Gina says he’ll go fetch him back and exit.

This leaves Gregers along with Hedvig. She doesn’t understand why her Daddy has left, was it something she did? She mentions the wild duck and Gregers decoys the conversation onto that. Turns out she’s added the wild duck to her regular evening prayer for her father. Gregers makes the preposterous proposal that Hedvig should kill the wild duck as a sacrifice in order to win her father back, to show that she is ready to make the biggest sacrifice in her world for his love.

Gina comes back saying Hjalmar’s gone out with Dr Relling and Molvik on the piss, and ruing the interference of clever strangers.

Act 5

Next morning, heavy snow on the skylights. Gina discovers Hjalmar did go out with the boys the night before and spent the night at Dr Relling’s i.e. downstairs.

Dr Relling arrives and delivers a blistering reality check. he tells Gregers he has a bad case of inflamed scruples; he is addicted to finding heroes to worship who are not heroes at all, like this Hjalmar who was very plausible at college because he was handsome and could quote other people’s ideas and words but was always a hollow man.

Dr Relling goes on to deliver what may be the play’s Big Idea which is the crucial importance of the LIFE-LIE. This is the lie about ourselves which enables us to go on living. Dr Relling has invented a category, the demoniac, to describe Molvik, who wears it as a badge of pride which explains his behaviour. Old Ekdal has invented his own life-lie and treats the loft with its old Christmas trees and rabbits as if it’s a vast forest which the he-man hunter bravely treks through. And Hjamar had a life-lie of himself as Provider for his family who was on the cusp of making the Great Invention which would free his family, until Gregers came along to destroy it.

Gregers disapprovingly asks if Dr Relling equates his ‘life-lie’ with Gregers’ notion of ‘the ideal’ and Dr Relling says, Damn right he does.

Hedvig enters. When Gregers points out that she hasn’t killed the wild duck, Hedvig very sensibly says she woke up this morning and it seemed like a silly idea. Ah, says Gregers, that is because you are a mere child and haven’t learned the ‘joyous spirit of self-sacrifice’. He really is a sanctimonious wanker.

Gregers leaves and Old Ekdal enters from the loft. Hedvig gets him to describe how he would go about hunting and shooting a wild duck – in the chest, that’s the place, he explains. After he’s pottered out Hedvig goes over to the shelf where Hjalmar left the pistol with one bullet in it and is touching it when Gina enters and she quickly turns away.

Hjalmar knocks and enters. Hedvig runs crying over to him but he cruelly pushes her away. He’s only come for his scientific books. (It’s a telling detail that Gina tells him these books a) lack spines i.e. they’re knackered and old but at the same time b) haven’t had the pages cut i.e. he’s never read them. The entire inventor thing is a palpable life-lie.)

When Hjalmar goes to go into a bedroom to look for his autobiography and other papers he sees Hedvig again. She comes out and tries to cling to her but he pushes her away. It’s then that she starts to think about the wild duck, about Gregers’s suggestion to sacrifice it. She goes to the shelf, takes down the pistol, hides it and sneaks backstage into the loft without her parents noticing, as they fuss and fret about which suitcase Hjalmar can use to take his stuff etc.

Gina asks if he wants to take his flute but he says no, just the pistol. They both look for it but can’t find it and assume the old man’s gone off with it.

Gina is admirably restrained. With the common sense of the uneducated she doesn’t make a scene or listen to any of Hjalmar’s fluff about the ideal and instead makes him a hot breakfast and cup of coffee. Erst fressen, den der Moral. Even as he craps on with his typically male grandiloquence and self-flattering visions of going from door to door in the snow asking someone to give him shelter, Gina tops up his coffee, brings him butter and feeds the animal, and the animal softens and asks, well, would it be possible for him to maybe bunk down in the living room for a few days. A process of healing the mind through the body.

In a similar spirit he comes across the letter from old Werle which he tore up yesterday, fingers it a bit, then asks Gina to bring some glue and more paper, and pastes it back together. After all, what right does he have to deprive someone else (his father) of their property.

Unfortunately the meddling imbecile Gregers arrives but Hjalmar is tired of his guff. When Gregers tells him he has his invention to live for, Hjalmar pooh-poohs that there’ll ever be an invention; anything good has already been invented. He reveals it was Dr Relling who gave him the idea of making a Great Invention in Photography, at which Gregers and we the audience go, aha – so this was the life-lie Dr Relling gave him – and that it made Hjalmar intensely happy to have one.

Now his life is in ruins. Above all he wonders whether Hedvig has ever loved him or whether she’s overheard Mrs Sörby and the other women talking, has realised she isn’t Hjalmar’s child, and has played him for a fool, just waiting for the opportunity to get money from her real grandfather and leave. What if Werle and Mrs Sörby come along and entice her away with a better life. Now his love for his daughter has been crushed.

It’s at this point that the gunshot we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw the pistol rings out. Gregers explains that Hedvig got her grandfather to shoot the thing that means most to her, the wild duck, in order to prove her love for her father. Hjalmar takes this at face value and is transformed, saying everything’s going to be alright now.

Unfortunately Old Ekdal comes out his bedroom door wondering what the shot was about. Gregers is even more impressed, that Hedvig has shot the wild duck by herself, but when they throw open the door to the animal loft they, of course, see her lying on the floor.

They carry her out and lay her on the table while Gina shouts down the stairs for Dr Relling who comes running and, after an examination, declares her dead, shot in the heart.

Hjalmar is thrown into an absolute delirium of anguish, if only he could call her back just for a minute, just long enough to tell her how much he infinitely loves her, oh God God, why won’t you allow me to tell her etc.

They carry her body into her bedroom for privacy and Gina tells Hjalmar that now they are the child’s parents, united in sorrow.

Dr Relling tells Gregers it was suicide. The powder burn on the dress indicates it was pressed right up against her chest. Gregers tries to salvage something by saying at least the child’s death will have an ennobling effect on the parents. Dr Relling witheringly replies, Give it nine months. Hjalmar is no poet or hero. He will spend the rest of his life wallowing in sentimentality and self pity. And Dr Relling sums up, maybe, the moral of the story:

RELLING: Life wouldn’t be too bad if only these blessed people who come canvassing their ideals round everyone’s door would leave us poor souls in peace.

Comments

Secrets and lies in marriage (yawn), combined with two of the half dozen oldest stories in the world – the rich and powerful man who has adulterous affairs and children with his servants and the innocent man who is palmed off with someone else’s child.

As the play went on, the simple-minded religiose language of Gregers, who insists his friend is undergoing a great spiritual revival, began to really irritate me. He’s an interfering twat.

Similarly, I got tired of his repeated use of the key phrase ‘claim of the ideal’. a) It’s such a stupid phrase in itself, but b) Ibsen has Gregers repeat it in a totally unrealistic way, more like a parrot than a man. This obtrusive repetition of the play’s catchphrase reminded me of the over-use of the phrase ‘enemy of the people’ which dominates the second half of the play of the same name.

According to the introduction, many critics consider ‘The Wild Duck’ Ibsen’s greatest play and, certainly, all the backstories and information are released in instalments with great cunning and artistry. But, in my opinion, all this artistry is in support of a dull premise. A poor man discovers his child may not be his after all and that his family is secretly supported by wealthy man who’s probably the child’s real father…

The symbolism of the wild duck hung very heavy round the neck of the narrative from its first mention – is it a poor, delicate, wounded and vulnerable creature like the girl who adopts it? Yes.

On top of this is the sheer dumb obviousness of the loaded gun. Everyone knows if you bring a loaded gun onstage in a play it is sooner or later going to be fired, from the moment it appeared the only question was who was going to snuff it and Ibsen plays with this by having Hjalmar tell Gregers about both his and his father’s suicide attempts. But these turn out to be not-so-clever decoys from the true victim.

And I was very upset by the suicide which ends the play but not in the way Ibsen intended: rather than bursting into tears at the sacrifice of this sweet innocent I was upset by how flagrantly manipulative it was.

A digression about opera: in my late 20s and 30s I went to lots of operas, at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera, at festivals and experimental theatres. All in all I went to about 100 operas. Eventually I started to get a bit fed up with several things about seeing opera, like how long they are and how hot it gets up in the gods at opera houses. But it was something very specific which made me stop buying tickets. I happened to see a run of four or five nineteenth-century operas in a row and in every single one the female lead died. Carmen, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, suddenly I had a kind of revelation. I looked around me and saw hundreds of people all being entertained by the spectacle of women being tortured, blackmailed, threatened, dying of disease or tormented into killing themselves and suddenly, in a flash, it disgusted me. The whole notion of women being subjected to grotesque suffering for my entertainment sickened me. I stopped and I’ve never been back.

So that is the mood in which I read the description of poor sweet Hedvig’s suicide and I felt that same revulsion all over again, that I was being emotionally manipulated and that a 14-year-old girl was the tool of my manipulation. Yuk!

In the same scene Hjalmar’s thrashing around begging for God to give him just one more minute so he could tell his daughter how much he loved her etc… I’d had enough.

It’s extremely well constructed, deeply pondered, the work of a master, but I didn’t like it at all.

Repelled by the exploitative melodrama of the climax, I realised I most enjoyed the opening scenes at old Werle’s party. I liked the banter between the servants Pettersen and Jensen. I liked the simple honest excess of the fat man and the bald man boasting about how much they could eat at a sitting. Gross but in a straightforward way which does nobody any harm except themselves.

A bit more subtly I liked the way Gina, with the wisdom of the uneducated, knew she didn’t have to engage in all this man talk about ideals and life-lies but simply had to lay on coffee and toast to begin to win her man back. I liked the subtlety of that scene and I think Gina emerges as the most sympathetic character, with almost all the men behaving like idiots.

But the constantly reappearing figure of Gregers, whose idiotic ‘idealism’ ruined every life he touched and killed a lovely little girl, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

James McFarlane’s introduction

In 1881 Ibsen began to draught an autobiography. He didn’t get further than his boyhood but that was enough to revive memories of: his sister, who was called Hedvig (!); his father who was bankrupted, suffering social ostracism and reducing the family to penury; the cramped attic where the Ibsen family was forced to live; the mess of furniture, old books and junk left by the previous occupants. In other words, there’s a surprising amount of autobiography in ‘The Wild Duck’.

McFarlane brings out how the world of the Ekdal household, although built on ‘a lie’ is a lovely fantasy. Hedvig lives a child’s fantasy of her father. Old Ekdal is away in his fantasies of hunting in the great pine forests. Hjalmar lives for his fantasy of becoming the Great Inventor, despite the complete lack of evidence for this. Only the down-to-earth Gina doesn’t live in a fantasy which is ironic because she is the one at the heart of the ‘lie’ i.e. the knowledge of how the entire fantasy world is sustained by Old Werle who used her as his mistress.

Like many of Ibsen’s plays ‘The Wild Duck’ comes ready-made for critical analysis. It is perfectly designed to be converted into a Sparks Notes summary of characters and themes. It is prime A-level material. ‘Discuss the role of truth and deception in…’ etc.

The central conceptual clash, I suppose, is between Dr Relling’s notion of the life-lie, the self-deceptions necessary to make the harsh realities of life bearable, to give life a meaning – and Gregers’ insistence on the claim of the wretched ‘ideal’, namely remorseless truth-telling at any cost. There’s enough there for a good essay. What McFarlane’s introduction made me realise was there’s a third big philosophy of life, which isn’t given a big name and is hiding in plain sight, and this is the worldly wisdom of Old Werle.

Werle makes no great speeches, wields no big ideas, but he represents the triumph of savoir faire, how to get on in the world, how to run a successful business for decades, how to arrange and manipulate everyone around you to suit your needs. As the play proceeds, what we see and sympathise with is the systematic destruction of all Hjalmar’s delusions: he thought he was happily married, he thought his wife was faithful, he thought he had fathered a beautiful little girl, he thought he was the provider and keeper of his little family – and he is wrong on every single on of those counts. Werle is presented as his nemesis, as the evil wizard behind all his woes. What’s not so obvious is to see it from the other end of the telescope, as a play about Werle’s triumph. This is what worldly wisdom looks like.

Apparently, we have Ibsen’s drafts of many of his plays and McFarlane explains what the drafts of ‘The Wild Duck’ tell us. This is that all the characters existed in early drafts but then he moved them around, gave them names or removed names, to create a sense of foreground and background characters. And the same with issues or events. McFarlane points out how the precise details of Old Ekdal’s crime, the murky references to Old Werle mistreating his wife, and above all the exact status of Hedvig’s paternity, these are all important but left deliberately vague and blurred, like the background in a painting.

Lastly, McFarlane devotes a page to the symbol of the wild duck itself which I found boring. He says it fulfils two functions: it means something but something different to every individual in the play; and it binds together the many strands of the play. Although it is never seen and not mentioned for long periods, in some sense it binds together not only the characters but the many themes of the play.

I can see how this is true and I can appreciate the extraordinary skill of the play’s construction. But it’s an entertainment based on the killing of a 14-year-old girl and I couldn’t overcome my simple revulsion at that fact.

Credit

I read ‘The Wild Duck’ in the 1960 translation by James McFarlane which was packaged up, along with his translations of ‘An Enemy of the People’ and ‘Rosmersholm’ into a World’s Classics paperback in 1988. I read the 2009 reprint.

Related links

• The Wild Duck online

Ibsen reviews

• The Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Rosmersholm (1886)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)

Play reviews

• Play reviews