In the last year of the 19th century, when Henrik Ibsen began a new play, his family – reports Michael Meyer’s biography – feared he would not finish it. Perhaps already weakened by the vascular illness that took hold soon after When We Dead Awaken’s completion, the writer was agitated, rushed.
The play is Ibsen’s shortest and like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to which it alludes, can be seen as an artist’s farewell. Norwegian sculptor Arnold Rubek returns, with his disappointed younger wife Maia, to a favoured resort hotel where they encounter Irene, model for the marble masterpiece that made Rubek rich and revered, and Ulfhejm, a primally direct bear-hunter, who might have wandered in from Peer Gynt.
