'घरकुली' एकटी आणि अडकलेली 'कुलवधू'...Henrik Ibsen@190

#HenrikIbsen190
Today March 20 2018 is 190th birth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', 1879 became a very popular play in Maharashtra of 20th century.  The play  was translated into Marathi - Gharkul (घरकुल ), 1941 by Anant Kanekar (अनंत काणेकर). Also M G Rangnekar's (मो.ग.रांगणेकर) play 'Kulvadhu' (कुलवधू) is inspired by it.

I have also felt that Jabbar Patel's (जब्बार पटेल), 1982 Marathi movie 'Umbartha' (उंबरठा )- featuring brilliantly acted Nora by Smita Pail (स्मिता पाटील)- was influenced by it.

This is how Ibsen's play ends: 

"...Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.

Helmer. Tell me what that would be!

Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that—. Oh,

Torvald, I don‘t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.

Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that—?

Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock. Good‐bye. (She goes out through the hall.)

Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone. (Ahope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all—?

(The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)"

I read the play while in school and it made a deep impression on me. 

Hilton Als says in The New Yorker, March 10 2014:

"...Actually, part of what makes the story feel so desperate and urgent in our hearts—we never want it to end—is that it so resembles life’s rhythms, with its various elisions and polite misdeeds and yearnings, and yet it’s better than reality, since “A Doll’s House” cannot be explained away, or treated merely as a distant object; once it enters our consciousness, it sweeps us up in its emotional irresolution. It is a knowing work but an innocent one.."

The most wonderful thing I read about it was: The sound of a door shutting was not just heard below but all over Europe!

As I have said earlier on this blog,  I was always scared in my childhood if mother would do Nora some day and later I had the same fear about my wife. 

Hilton Als concludes  his review with these words: "...Before Nora leaves, she tells Torvald that he’s a stranger to her, and she can’t live in a house with a stranger. But that’s not true. Torvald was Nora’s self, or that part of herself which was once ravenous for the security that comes from being a citizen of a limited, calculable world."

I agree with Mr. Als: Most of us want to be a citizen of a limited, calculable world.

                                                             Isolated and trapped?

'Room in New York', 1932

Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: the art and the artist’, 1980:

“...In ‘Room in New York’, an oil painting of 1932, a man reads his newspaper, while the woman he is ignoring turns halfheartedly toward a piano and picks out a tune. The viewer, looking in through the window, has been assigned the role of voyeur...”