Hendrick Johan Ibsen was the pioneer who opened the new frontiers of the midern drama and violated all the unwritten taboos of the 19th century theatre. In "A DOLL'S HOUSE" he gought against the subjugation of modern woman. In "GHOSTS" he introduced the theme of venereal disease to the stage and anatomized the provincial and puritanical repressiveness of middle-class life. In "AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE" he vented his spleen on the vested interests and their opportunistic minions in the intelligentsia. And in "THE WILD DUCK " he poured his scorn on moralistic meddlers in people's lives.

Whatever them he touched, Ibsen brought light into dark corners of the soul and society, and with it his grim humor, his scathing irony, and his wealth of compassionate understanding for weak and fallible humanity.