This is Crash Course in theater and today will be visiting one of the greatest grudge matches of 19th century drama, the Bidder.

Scandinavian rivalry between Norway's Henrik Ibsen and Sweden's August Strindberg.

How ugly was this rivalry?

Simpson bought a portrait of Strindberg, re titled it The Outbreak of Madness and hung it above his writing desk.

He is my mortal enemy, Ibsen told a friend, and shall hang there and watch while I write.

I think he looks so delightfully mad.

What did I say about acting like a gentleman?

Will also be looking at how both Ibsen and Strindberg created shattering, realistic and naturalistic dramas and then made late career turns towards symbolism.

The two of them basically invented modern drama.

Lights up, meet Henrik Ibsen and his mutton chops.

Simpson was born in Norway, in the port town of Shen.

He left school at the age of 15 and apprenticed himself to a pharmacist.

At 18 he got the pharmacists 28 year old maid pregnant and she had a son that he never met.

He spent the next few years writing verse dramas that no one paid much attention to and helping to head a theater.

Then he married and left Norway and wrote a pair of hugely influential verse plays Brand, which is about a priest so stern and unshakable that he lets everyone die.

And Pierre Ghent, a parable about identity derived from folk tales.

It has trolls, runaway brides, the Sphinx and the fearsome monster called the Boy.

And even though Ibsen I thought it was basically unstable, directors like to try now Maybe you're thinking, uh, this is the guy who transforms realism.

The everyone dies in an avalanche party down with the Troll King Dude.

Yeah, because after writing Emperor and Gallon, which Ibsen and only ABS and considers his best play, something wild happened.

Ibsen decided that prose is for reality verse for visions, and he started writing plays about bourgeois people in trouble, which, incidentally, is also the rejected first title for House Hunters International.

First, Ibsen wrote the pillars of society and then a doll's house ghost and an enemy of the people.

People demand reality, Ibsen wrote.

No more, no less, and Gibson gave it to them.

It's hard to describe how important and shocking these plays were to 19th century theater, they seemed to shake the very foundations of civil society in Europe.

One of the things that made them so radical is that they don't look radical.

If you squint, they look like scribbles, well made plays with end of act cliffhangers, plenty of plot twists and a recognizable narrative arc.

But Ibsen made important changes.

He got rid of the really artificial stuff like the soliloquies and streamlined the exposition, shifting the themes towards heredity and environment.

Screams sacrificed characterization to the demands of plot but IBS and held character, complicated, multi layered character Paramount.

Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind, through and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul, he wrote.

But here's the real scandal.

Screams.

Plays end with discoveries that reaffirm comfortable ideas about marriage and Children.

Bourgeois people out of trouble.

Instance, plays end by revealing the bourgeois family as a sham.

Thes plays don't complacently transmit received ideas.

They argue that the ideas themselves are the problem.

Unlike some realistic and naturalistic writers, Simpson never enjoyed degradation for its own sake, he wrote.

A little prudish Lee Zola descends into the sewer to bathe in it, I to cleanse it.

But plenty of his critics felt that his plays weren't clean enough.

There's a famous review of ghosts that compared to the play to a kn open drain, a loathsome sore unbanned edged a dirty act.

Done publicly, Elazar House, with all its doors and windows open.

Go on, tell us what you really think.

For a closer look, let's explore one of Gibson's only slightly less controversial plays, his 18 79 work A Doll's House.

The ending was such a shock that Ibsen wrote an alternate ending for German audiences.

Help us out.

Probable.

Nora Helmer is a nice middle class wife preparing a nice middle class Christmas for Torvald, her bank manager, husband and their three Children.

Nora receives a visit from her school friend Christine, who hopes that Torvald will give her a job at his bank As they chat, Nora reveals that years ago she borrowed money for a trip to improve Torvalds health, forging her dad's signature on the bank loan.

Torvald says that yes, he could give Christine a job because he's about to fire creepy craw Gstaad.

But after Torvald leaves, cranks Todd sneaks in and tells Nora he now knows about her loan secret, and if he's fired, he'll expose her as a forger.

Nora's friend Dr Rank also pays a visit.

Torvald refuses to rehire Crocs Todd So Croc's dad shoves a letter detailing Nora's crimes into Torvalds mailbox.

Dr Rank returns and tells Nora that he's dying of a veneer eel disease.

Contract it by his father, heredity and environment and that he loves her.

He says this using an elaborate metaphor involving asparagus.

And nor is all, uh, asparagus Gotta go.

Nora confesses to Christine and Christine's all craw Gstaad.

I used to date that dude, let me see what I can do.

And then Torre bald is all.

Hey, why don't you practice your sexy dance that you're going to do it tomorrow's costume party because it's important that we establish how I see you as a sexual object rather than a human being.

But Nora dances badly on purpose so that Torvald will have to spend the evening coaching her and won't have time to check the mail.

Then she thinks about killing herself.

Thanks that bubble.

In the final act, Christine tells Crocs, Dad that she's always loved him.

And Crocs.

Dad says, Okay, I'm so happy I'll take back the letter.

But Christine is like now it's time.

Everyone knows the truth.

Nora and Torvald returned from the costume party with Dr Rank, who tells them he has toe go off and die now, and Torvald finally checks the mail.

He reads the letter, and instead of praising Nora for her ingenuity and sacrifice, he turns on her and tells her that she's ruined them all and that she's not a fit mother.

Then a letter arrived from Crow Gstaad returning the forged document.

Torvald All, huh?

Just kidding.

We're saved.

Yea, but Nora's all late.

You've just shown me that our marriage was always a hollow fiction.

I'm leaving you and the Children and going out into the world to discover who I really am.

Here's your ring back.

Okay, thanks.

Bye, ee, Door slam.

Heard around the world.

It's and borrows from bourgeois drama and melodrama but also inverts their conclusions.

Earlier dramas imply a return to conservative values, but Gibson's work suggests that these values are all wrong and that they keep people from realizing their full humanity and potential in the late 19th century.

It's hard to imagine an act more brave and subversive.

The Nora's It's and continued to write prose dramas.

But in his late plays like The Wild Duck and especially when we did awaken, he returned to a kind of mystical symbolism.

Ducks aren't just ducks, Mountains aren't just mountains.

Thes tragic, beautiful plays became a huge influence on later writers who argued that maybe realism actually isn't the best way to capture the experience of life after his trist with the pharmacists made Ibsen is life.

For the record, it was impeccably upright, moral and bourgeois itself.

That was just one of the many things that Strindberg hated about him.

The Newman to Gibson's Seinfeld.

Strindberg was a playwright, historian and alchemist and apparently a really fun guy when he wasn't having bouts of extreme paranoia or raging against the Jews.

Strindberg was born in 18 49 to a mother who had been a servant after a brief stint as a pharmacist's assistant.

Coincidence, he studied modern languages and wrote a bunch of history plays.

While working as a librarian, he married Siri von Essen, an actress from an aristocratic family, and together they left Sweden in the 18 eighties, Strindberg began to correspond with Zola and discovered naturalism before eventually turning to symbolism.

He had two more marriages and periodic breakdowns, including instances of paranoia, where he thought the world was full of Strindberg impersonators.

Why did he hate him since so much?

Well, he thought that Ibsen had modeled a couple of ineffectual characters after him.

Do you know that my seed has fallen into Gibson's brainpan and a fertilized?

Now he carries my seed and is my uterus, Strindberg wrote.

So first.

For the record, Strindberg also hated Gibson's focus on independent women, calling him an ignorant women's writer.

No, like I'm pretty much reading exclusively for Ibsen all the way in this rivalry, but we're gonna see what Strindberg got up to when he wasn't paranoid or win Jing.

Strindberg's first artistic successes were a trio of naturalistic plays.

The father, Miss Julie and the creditors in his most famous play, Miss Julie, written in 18 88 and Aristocratic Woman, has sex with her father's manservant.

Realizing she is now in his power, she commits suicide.

Strindberg published a preface to the play explaining his naturalistic theories in his preface, he wrote that the theater has always been a public school for the young, the half educated and women who still possess that primitive capacity for deceiving themselves or letting themselves be deceived, and that he was goingto work to write something more truthful.

Yeah, if it isn't entirely clear by now.

Strindberg had huge, borderline psychotic issues with women like Gibson and the French naturalists.

Strindberg believed that character was way more important than plot, and he spent a lot of time exploring the psychological aspects of his characters, especially as they related to our good friends.

Heredity, an Environment.

Here's his explanation for what leads to miss Julie's tragic fate.

Her mother's primary instincts, her father raising her incorrectly, her own nature and the influence of her fiance on her weak and degenerate brain.

Also more particularly the festive atmosphere of midsummer night, her father's absence, her monthly indisposition, her preoccupation with animals, the provocative effect of the dancing, the mid summer twilight to the powerful, the aphrodisiac influence of flowers and finally, the chance that drives the couple together into a room alone, plus the boldness of the aroused man.

So, for the record, again, yes, the guy doesn't take psychology lightly.

Or actually, after some periods of occultism and insanity, don't ask Strindberg.

Like Gibson made a late turn towards symbolism, he began to write plays that have the feel of dreams or nightmares, including to Damascus, A Dream Play and the Ghost Sonata.

Like his earlier realist works, these are about people seeking meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.

But in these Symbolist works, Strindberg abandoned psychological realism for something stranger and more fragmented.

The author, he wrote, has sought to imitate the disconnected but apparently logical form of a dream.

Upon an insignificant background of real life events.

The imagination spins and weaves new patterns, a blend of memories, experiences, pure inventions, absurdities and improvisations.

Strindberg's late plays anticipate Expressionism and the surrealism styles will explore in upcoming episodes.

Thes two guys who hated each other pretty much established or anticipated most of the major forms of 19th century drama, and it's worth noting that even though they loathed each other personally, they did kind of sneakily admire each other's work.

Ibsen couldn't deny that Strindberg had real talent, and Strindberg once wrote that since Gibson had written a play as good as ghosts.

It was impossible to hate on him completely.

Next time we're after Russia toe hang with that bespectacled modernist colossus Anton Chekhov.

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