20/03/2026
On Henrik Ibsen’s birthday today, we wish not only to celebrate the most performed playwright in the world after William Shakespeare. We also wish to honour a man who was introverted and inward-looking, who played with puppet theatre as a child, only to have other children grow jealous and cut the strings of his puppets.
We wish to honour a shy theatre director who, at the beginning of his career in Bergen, sat hidden beneath a hat at the back of the theatre. A man who believed that actors and directors must revise and revise the text until it finally falls naturally into place on stage. A writer who believed that although a play may have a clear ending, everything could turn out entirely differently tomorrow.
A man who fought for the rights of the individual. And when he was praised as someone who wrote so remarkably about women’s rights, he replied: I do not write about women’s rights, but about human rights.
A man whose work is performed all over the world because he is not only of his time, but above all timeless — because he reveals the existential core of what it means to be human.❤️
Happy birthday! 🎂
Drawing by .fluge.hole
