Dead Awaken? An empirical study of Ibsen’s presence in contemporary Flemish theater

Abstract

In 1880 the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam put on Pillars of Society, the first time Henrik Ibsen was staged in Dutch. Ever since Ibsen has been part of theater life in the Low Countries. As Rob van der Zalm has shown in his standard study on the reception of Ibsen in the Netherlands, the extent of this presence has fluctuated over time. After a tentative start, an introductory decade (1880–1890) was followed by a period of 40 years during which the number of productions were about 20 per decade. From 1930 until 1970 the number of productions decreased drastically, to less than then 10 per decade, but from 1970 onward the interest for Ibsen increased manifestly again. Van der Zalm notes that by the time he ends his investigation, 1995, 26 productions of Ibsen had already been staged, as many as during the entire 1980s. In a brief follow-up study published in the wake of the 2006 Ibsen anniversary van der Zalm observes that “(b) etween 1991 and 2000 the number of Ibsen productions reached the astonishing figure of forty, which means an average of four every season” (Van der Zalm 2007, 118). Van der Zalm’s data refer to the staging of Ibsen in the Netherlands. A similar rigorous investigation of the situation in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is unfortunately not available. This article aims to contribute to our understanding of the reception of Ibsen in contemporary Flanders. To this end, I develop a double perspective: on the one hand, I focus on the production side, studying how often Ibsen – and which Ibsen – has been staged in Flanders since 1985; on the other hand, I examine Ibsen’s status for contem-