ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the discussion started in the last under the heading ‘Fantasy and reality’. Plays differ in the degree to which they provide a realistic setting for the action on the stage, but, however realistic it is, much that is portrayed is in the realm of fantasy. In Ibsen’s social plays, written between 1877 and 1890, from Pillars of Society to Hedda Gabler, the characters, relatively few in number—five in Ghosts, for instance—all give the illusion of being fully formed persons, presenting themselves as real although their reality is illusory. The illusion is supported by a realistic setting in that the action goes on in a reception room in a home, for instance, furnished with tables, chairs, portraits, flowers, a stove, lamps and ornaments, and very different from the spaces in which plays are acted out in our dreams.
