Ibsen out of Date?

Abstract

On 10 March 1911, Ben Iden Payne’s company came to Dublin with Shaw’s The Philanderer (1893). Shaw later noted that the play suffered from a ‘disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years’.¹ The Philanderer is a satirical reaction to the London Ibsen wrangle of the 1890s; much of the action takes place in the imaginary Ibsen club, whose membership is restricted to ‘unwomanly women and unmanly men’.² It was obviously out of date. The Irish Times commented that it belonged to the days ‘when Ibsenism, like Wagnerism and impressionism was “advanced” and when the feminist movement was a crude and unlovely thing’.³ The critic suggested that ‘[n]ow that Post Impressionism has arrived, and, despite all affectation of sprightliness, is being regarded as passé the “topical” elements in The Philanderer appear almost mid-Victorian’.⁴