Three Major Plays

Includes the plays Peer Gynt, Rosmersholm, When We Dead Waken

The three plays in this volume are representative of Ibsen’s extraordinary achievement as a playwright. The first is perhaps his best known work, the great dramatic poem Peer Gynt, presented here in the acclaimed translation used by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its 1982 production. With this are Romersholm, in which Ibsen unmasks the moral evasions which prevent us from being truly free, and When We Dead Waken, in which a figure from the past rises to haunt an ageing artist.
These distinctive translations are accompanied by an introductory foreword and are followed by notes on pronunciations and other details and aspects of Ibsen’s original texts.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) has been described as ’the father of modern theatre’. Most of his early plays were traditional historical dramas. After ’Peer Gynt’, a fairy-tale fantasy in verse, Ibsen wrote the rest of his plays in prose, and came to be regarded as the great Naturalist dramatist. David Rudkin’s first play, Afore Night Comes, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in their 1962 experimental season, informed the Company’s revolutionizing approach to the performance of Shakespeare. David writes for television, radio, and theatre.