OTTO BRAHM’S IBSEN CYCLE AT THE LESSING-THEATER IN BERLIN

In 1909, an Ibsen cycle comprising all of Ibsen’s thirteen contemporary dramas, from The League of Youth to When We Dead Awaken, was presented at the Lessing-Theater in Berlin. The plays were performed consecutively, in chronological order, in the course of six weeks. The cycle was theatre director Otto Brahm’s grand summing-up of his enduring efforts of promoting Ibsen and his works in Germany. The paper examines this performance cycle from different angles. Why did Brahm present the plays as a cycle? What happens when a cyclic pattern is applied on Ibsen’s works? Research has revealed a great number of Ibsen cycles in German-speaking theatres in the period before World War II. Brahm’s Ibsen cycle was the most prominent, but not by far the only of its kind. The paper points out how thoroughly Brahm planned the cycle, his clever media strategies and how he in the end designed the cycle as a monument of Ibsen and – not least – of his own achievements as the foremost German champion of Ibsen. How was the critical reception of the cycle? Measured both by audience response and critical reception, the cycle was a success. The cycle concept as such, however, was not judged critically. The cyclic take on Ibsen’s works was neither confirmed nor rejected.

Nordlit 34,2015 This may seem like a banalised interpretation of Ibsen's sentence.But the fact is simple.Ibsen's works were not created as a cycle.They may be -for one reason or another -construed as a cycle in the Oxford Dictionary sense, but in essence they do not constitute a cycle.
Why did Brahm, then, mount Ibsen's plays as a performance cycle?Three factors seem to have been decisive.1) The tautological explanation: He really did perceive Ibsen's works as a continuous whole.2) Ibsen was a lodestar for Brahm in all theatrical endeavors, in which he was involved.3) Ibsen's plays engaged audiences.Let me elaborate on these three points.

Brahm's holistic interpretation of Ibsen's works
Brahm was a great admirer of Ibsen during his whole professional career and, in a German context, there was no one who promoted Ibsen's authorship as strongly and persistently as him.In the 1880s, Brahm worked as a literary critic in Berlin.Already in 1886, in Brahm's first major essay on Ibsen, it is obvious that Brahm applied a holistic approach to Ibsen's works.He pointed out that Ibsen's plays were characterized by an "abundance of interlocking issues".Ibsen strives for a "complete description of reality".Parallel to the basic theme of his works run other themes, which set "new motifs".And whenever a motif is "unable to find its complete expression in a work, it is taken up again in the next: connecting threads are thus running from The League of Youth to A Doll's House, and from A Doll's House to Ghosts" (Brahm, 1886, 212).*At this point, in 1886, no new Ibsen play had been staged at any German theatre for five years.Brahm saw in Ibsen a great potential to stimulate and revitalize German theatre, and in the 1886 essay he complains that no one has redeemed the duty of "introducing a full audience coherently to the train of [Ibsen's] thoughts and making German theatregoers ready for Ibsen through a presentation of his modern plays, from The League of Youth onwards" (Brahm, 1886, 219-220).Brahm, here in fact, submits a claim which he himself complies with twenty-two years later.If Ibsen's life and works are so coherent and consistent as many claim, Brahm's life and works seem even more coherent.
But note that Brahm here mentions the plays from The League of Youth onwards.Altogether, Ibsen wrote 26 plays.His thirteen contemporary plays from The League of Youth to When We Dead Awaken make up only half of them.Thus, Brahm's Ibsen cycle in fact didn't present Ibsen from A to Z, but Ibsen from M to Z. Brahm's spotting of the "connecting threads" among Ibsen's works, in his essay from 1886, is made valid with the same reservation.The holistic approach to Ibsen's collected works seems to presuppose exclusion of what doesn't fit in: the first half of his authorship.

Ibsen as Brahm's lodestar
In 1889 Brahm became the head of the theatre society Freie Bühne in Berlin.Up until his death in 1912 he was a key figure in German theatre and he was pivotal in the modern breakthrough on the German stage.In a retrospective glance in 1909, Brahm characterized the founding of the Freie Bühne as a "German theatre revolution" evolving out of Ibsen's "revolution of the human spirit".Ibsen was the Nordlit 34, 2015 "progenitor" of the Freie Bühne movement, claims Brahm (Brahm, 1915, 462), and the decisive revolutionary moment was Freie Bühne's inaugural performance of Ghosts in 1889.
The Freie Bühne was the set-out, but Brahm didn't have a company at his disposal during his five years as head of the Freie Bühne.It wasn't until 1894, when Brahm was appointed the theatre director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, that he could carry out his modern reform of German theatre in a systematic manner.And it eventually became clear that this very reform revolved around the works of Ibsen.During Brahm's ten years at the Deutsches Theater he had four playwright lodestars: Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler and Georg Hirschfeld, all four firmly rooted in naturalism.During his subsequent eight years as the theatre director of the Lessing-Theater in Berlin, three of them still prevailed as Brahm's lodestars: Ibsen, Hauptmann and Schnitzler.The following figures are telling.From 1904 to 1912 Brahm presented 704 Hauptmann performances (nineteen plays), 635 Ibsen performances (thirteen plays) and 144 Schnitzler performances (eight plays) at the Lessing-Theater (Buth, 1965, 19).

Ibsen as a box office playwright
A survey of Brahm's repertoire during his directorship at the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing-Theater tells us one thing.He was very one-sided.Compared to Duke Georg II and his Meininger company before him and Max Reinhardt after him, he was conspicuously negative towards the classics.In eight years at the Lessing-Theater, he presented only one single classic play: Schiller's Demetrius.
This, however, despite what we would expect from a contemporary perspective, did not imply low box office incomes.Today, a theatre presenting a repertoire of exclusively contemporary plays, at least in Norway, would be in need of a full subsidy.But the Lessing-Theater in Berlin was a private theatre without subsidies.Brahm was wholly dependent on box office income.Ibsen was by no means a playwright Brahm put on only to get intellectual credibility.Many of his Ibsen productions were box office successes.Among the twelve most frequently performed plays at the Lessing-Theater during Brahm's management, three Ibsen plays are featured: Pillars of Society with 94 performances, Hedda Gabler with 83 performances and Rosmersholm with 81 performances (Claus, 1981, 120).

The tradition of Ibsen cycles in German-speaking theatres
By who, when and where was the first Ibsen cycle presented?What sort of tradition was it?But first of all, what is at the core of the phenomenon?When Ibsen's plays are strung together in a cycle, a connection is established which transcends the perspective of the individual play.In itself, this represents a break of the normal seasonal planning procedure in the theatre industry.A company selects a series of dramatic texts, divides them evenly across the season and runs the season accordingly.If theatre cycles break this pattern, the single-work focus is transgressed.
It's not every playwright's privilege to get their plays put together in theatre cycles.Ibsen is part of a distinguished, exclusive group.In my research of Germanspeaking theatre I've only come across Shakespeare, Schiller, Wagner and Mozart Nordlit 34, 2015 cycles.There is obviously a strong element of recognition and acknowledgement in this.If your plays are put together in a cycle, you are a top-ranking playwright.If you're not in the lead, you won't come into question.This is condition no. 1.But secondly, your works need to be "cycl-able".I haven't come across any Bjørnson cycles.His authorship was, seemingly, too incoherent and disjointed.He wasn't cyclable.
As far as I have been able to track, the very first Ibsen cycle was presented at the Schänzli-Theater in Bern in Switzerland in 1889.Six "Ibsen Evenings" were given of three Ibsen plays: A Doll's House, Rosmersholm, and The Lady from the Sea.I've found a total of 21 similar Ibsen cycles.
Nordlit 34, 2015 All plays had been performed at the Lessing-Theater prior to the cycle.Two of the productions, The League of Youth and A Doll's House, were called "Neueinstudierungen" (new productions), but in fact a couple of changes in the cast was what it all boiled down to.The plays were by no means given a directorial make-over.The complete Ibsen cycle was in fact a large-scale recycling of well-known material.The compilation of the thirteen plays and the cumulative effect of presenting them consecutively in chronological sequence was the whole point.Werner Buth, in his monography about the Lessing-Theater, confirms this: The mise-en-scène of the individual performances was not fundamentally reworked for the cycle.They appeared in the well-known concept of the previous repertory performances.However, the cycle conveyed an impression of the coherence of Ibsen's individual works in a previously unknown manner.The re-emergence and merging of motifs and themes in Ibsen's dramas was evident and promoted the understanding of the poet's work.But the exegetical tendency of the cycle could only do its work persuasively through the chronological sequence of the plays (Buth, 1965, 65-66).
The chronological sequence was, however, not absolutely correct.In Brahm's cycle, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder switched places.Why? Brahm wanted to let The Master Builder follow The Lady from the Sea because the character Hilde Wangel connects the two plays (Buth, 1965, 65).In a sense this was a logical move.It illustrates that Brahm's basic focus really was the "connecting threads".The theatre audience was introduced to Hilde Wangel in The Lady from the Sea.She reemerges in The Master Builder.Brahm wanted to let the audiences know what became of the character.The Master Builder is the answer to that question.But Hilde Wangel is not the only character to appear in more than one play.What about Aslaksen in The League of Youth who re-emerges in An Enemy of the People?Why didn't Brahm let the latter play follow the former?Brahm was inconsistent.There was an element of arbitrariness in Brahm's set-up.He is neither re-producing the real chronology of Ibsen's plays, nor presenting the plays consistently in accordance with his own focus on the "connecting threads".

The critical reception of Otto Brahm's Ibsen cycle
To survey the critical reception of Brahm's Ibsen cycle in its entirety is, in fact, not easy.As a media event the cycle was of a somewhat elusive nature.If you look at the playbills from the theatre, the matter is clear and simple.The cycle opens on 29