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Over the past seven years, Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller's productions of Ibsen's plays have deservedly caught the attention of Western Europe's experimental theatre scene. Their five works to date-A Doll House (2006), Ghosts (2007), The Wild Duck (2009), John Gabriel Borkman (2011), and 12-Spartenhaus (an adaptation of An Enemy of the People, 2013)-are a sprawling, interconnected series known as the Ibsen-Saga. Each production features the artists' hallmark aesthetics and open-ended running times, with performances lasting between an hour and two continuous weeks. The shows' impressive lengths, during which spectators freely come and go, are achieved by staging expanded versions of the plays in a deliberately slow-motion performance style. The artists' striking aesthetics and liberal approach to the source material obscure the fact that the Saga is a sophisticated and passionate engagement with the playwright's works. Eschewing narrative and historical linearity, the Saga treats Ibsen's art and influence as a lens through which European culture and history can be reimagined. Rather than faithfully stage the author's texts, Vinge and Müller theatricalize Ibsen's ethos by drawing from the breadth of history to illustrate the playwright's themes and aesthetics. Ibsen's oeuvre is presented through a network of cultural signs and referents that, to use Brian Johnston's term, operate like a "super-text." But this "super-text," rather than an inherent structure underlying the text, is here overtly foregrounded. What Vinge and Müller see as Ibsen's covert symbolic content is baldly staged through the imagery of popular culture put on a par with archetypal iconography. Guiding this impressive sweep are dialectical counterpoints-recognizable to Ibsen scholars and enthusiasts-that define character and spur dramatic conflict: children versus adults, good versus evil, art versus commerce, reality versus fiction, free will versus heredity. Distilling Ibsen's themes to binary oppositions enables the artists to stage the plays as modern-day fairy tales in which the children become the protagonists and are depicted as innocents who must overcome a series of obstacles en route to self-realization. Once the children overthrow the depraved adults, all is resolved through a happy ending in which virtue triumphs and justice is restored to the world.
Despite its intertextuality and wild alteration of the plays' dialogue and structures, Vinge and Müller's work is distinct from preceding post-modern, deconstructive Ibsen productions. Utilizing the...