Ibsen Roles Performed by Elizabeth Robins
By Joanne E. Gates for the Robins Web at Jacksonville State University
This page expands the note within Ibsen and the Actress where Robins states she played seven Ibsen roles.
The real count is eight, if one lists her performance in the fourth act only of Brand, which was presented in a bill along with The Master Builder, for her Ibsen Repertory Series of 1893, in which she also debuted as Rebecca West in Rosmersholm and reprised her roles of Hedda and Hilda. In sequence, she performed: Martha Bernick, Mrs. Linden, Hedda, Hilda Wangel, Agnes Brand, Rebecca West, Asta, Ella Rentheim.
She also read the parts of two additional women's roles in Copyright Performance readings: Rita of Little Eyolf, and Irene of When We Dead Awaken.
A complete list of Ibsen in England was prepared by Miriam A. Franc for her dissertation from University of Pennsylvania, published in 1919 and now available at Internet Archive. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7122036M/Ibsen_in_England.
Although Michael Egan's Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (electronic access at JSU Libraries) does not include a section that reviews ER's Ibsen Repertory Series, an excellent YouTube presentation covers the phenomenon of the 1893 cycle of plays:
Details on the Repertory Series of Ibsen plays performed by Robins in 1893 can be found in the recorded paper, "Carnival of Ibsenites: The 1893 Collaboration of Elizabeth Robins and Alice Stopford Green," Ibsenites 1893
A YouTube version (with interruptive ads) provides captions, or the option to listen with auto-generated and often inaccurate transcript, Ibsenites on YouTube.
Dr. Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin of University of Limerick presented this paper through Zoom /facebook with the posted copy archived at Moore Institute.
At her twitter profile she includes phonetic rendering of her name: (pronounced Quail-een Nee Vack-awn) Lecturer in Communications and specialist in Irish Cultural History. The alternate title is "Carnival Time Among the Ibsenites." The talk includes useful and informative graphics. At just after 25:00 minutes, the presentation discusses the reviews of the series and lists the outlets who published these reviews. She notes that her title comes from the negative review by Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph. My biography points out (p. 69) that Robins returned profits to the subscribers. Dr. Bheacháin adds that the funding committee used part of the proceeds to present Robins with a silver tea set, whereabouts unknown. See further description at the above Moore Institute link, and cross-listed among the Robins Webs External Links.
Also of interest is that Robins many times participated in what were considered the "Copyright" Performance of a play. These were readings in Norwegian, staged at a commercial theatre, for the purposes of the English publisher and translator securing the rights. My creative piece, Hedda and Hilda and I, a two-act play, copyright 1978, fictionalizes the disappointment Robins faced after participating in the copyright performance of When We Dead Awaken. Robins noted that she considered the play, obviously his last, "wreckage on a giant scale" and would need to move on to other pursuits. In my play, she revisits highlights of her earlier Ibsen roles and discusses the decade of commitments with Shaw, James, Archer. In Act Two, set ten years later, she is a spokeswoman for Women's Suffrage. Yet the spirits of Hedda and Hilda advise her.
Angela John's biography of Robins, Staging a Life (Routledge, 1994), lists in graph form, in Appendix One, all the roles Elizabeth Robins performed on the English stage, including these copyright performances and productions outside of London. There are some minor typographical errors. The chapter is available in electronic format through JSU Libraries. Myron Matlaw has outlined her travel in American touring performances, to which Robins refers elsewhere in Ibsen and the Actress.
Of course, a major reference work is The London Stage, 1890-1899: A Calendar of Plays and Players by J. P. Wearing (in 2 volumes, Scarecrow Press, 1976). Wearing indexes each individual for his or her enumerated roles. Each play entry in calendar order gives details for where reviews of the performances are published. Hardly any of these are referenced in Sue Thomas's excellent Bibliography of Robins as writer, but scholars of ER's stage career (Cima, Heath, Hill, Farfan) have made use of the contemporary reviews of her performances. Notably, Henry James published "On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler" as a review, after he had seen the performance. But he promoted The Master Builder three days in anticipation of its first performance, as one of the coterie of informal critics who had attended rehearsals, discussed by Robins elsewhere in Ibsen and the Actress. (See reprints of James's essays in Egan.)