Quinn Roberts

At a time when European playwrights extolled the virtues of propriety and traditional family life, Henrik Ibsen sought to penetrate them. “If we look beneath the façade,” he asked in such plays as An Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House, “would 19th-century Europe like what it finds?” Paul Binding’s reimaging of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea is a worthwhile choice. The narrator of The Stranger from the Sea inhabits a setting that, like those in Ibsen’s plays, suppresses its truths through propriety and etiquette. Having relocated to the seaside town of Dengate to work at a newspaper, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges feels unsettled by a refrain: “Would you say that you are cheerful?” This ethos guidesthe lives of Dengate’s townspeople, including Martin’s over-dramatic landlady and […]