ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the translation and adaptation of naturalistic drama from the mid-nineteenth century. It provides an assessment of the translatorial and dramaturgical issues involved in staging the text and subtext of Henrik Ibsen’s drama in particular. In Ibsen’s time, to reveal the characters on stage in an authentic, bourgeois living room, with all its homely and intimate touches, was an innovative, even daring concept. His plays opened up a new form of theatre, a naturalism which stripped the characters of their privacy and included the audience in the drama. He is extremely accomplished in inventing a theatrical language in which the visual and the verbal complement each other. His form of naturalistic theatre functioned against contemporary conventions and became part of the artistic revolutions at the end of the century, part of the development of other movements in the arts such as symbolism and expressionism.
