The Wild Duck

Often considered Ibsen’s greatest work, The Wild Duck marked a new departure for the father of modern drama, blending the naturalism of his middle dramas with the symbolism of his late period. The play explores the world of the Ekdals, a family whose peaceful existence is fragmented and destroyed in the name of “truth.” With its ironic shifting of illusion and reality, and its impassioned cry for personal freedom, The Wild Duck remains as disturbing and challenging as ever, and combines, in Bernard Shaw’s words, the profoundest tragedy with irresistible comedy.

SYNOPSIS

Gregers Werle, the idealistic son of a wealthy businessman, has returned home from seventeen years of self-imposed exile. At a party thrown for him by his father, he meets his childhood friend, Hjalmar Ekdal, now an impoverished photographer married with a fourteen-year-old daughter, Hedvig.

From a couple of chance remarks, Gregers begins to suspect that the Ekdals’ social and financial decline might in some way be connected with his father’s greed, both commercial and sexual. He confronts Old Werle, who attempts to buy his silence. Determined to reveal the extent of his father’s corruption, Gregers quits his family home again, and takes a room in the Ekdals’ garret, which they share with Hjalmar’s elderly father and a menagerie of chickens, rabbits, and Hedvig’s special pet, an injured wild duck.

Piece by piece, Gregers sets about exposing and dismantling the illusions upon which the Ekdals’ happiness is based, fragmenting the peaceful household in the name of truth, with ultimately tragic consequences.