Wild Duck #1

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?” To what extent do you find this statement applicable in at least two plays you have studied?

Both Oedipus and Wild Duck use conflicts, and rumors, within the first few lines of the plays. However, Ibsen also includes a party scene, in which guests are seen making idle chit-chat and questioning their host about such trivial matters as the rules against smoking in the house. Sophocles, on the other hand, does not waste any idle words and almost every scene in the play is building up to the climax.

Sophocles, who uses the chorus as a way to draw the audience even closer to the action in the play, says on page 198, “Never—no, by the blazing Sun, first god of the heavens! Stripped of the gods, stripped of loved ones, let me die by inches if that ever crossed my mind. But the heart inside me sickens, dies as the land dies” (Sophocles 198). Even the chorus, who should have no familial or even communal ties to the actors in the play, show how they are enormously interested and grieved at the turn of events. They show how they truly care, and also help maintain the pace of the careening play, which never seems to slow down in its emotional intensity. We see Oedipus try to save his land, interrogate witnesses to old events, and eventually find out the truth about his lineage and his fate, and throughout it all Sophocles keeps the intensity at the maximum.

In Wild Duck, however, we see a definite contrast of styles. Ibsen introduces some dramatic elements when he opens the play with a rumor about the supposed relationship between the master of the house and the housekeeper, but then he shifts over to a party scene in which the guests are fairly relaxed and unconcerned with more emotional events. One guest, who Ibsen describes simply with the title “the fat guest” says, “But really, is it true you’ve abolished our precious smoking privilege?” to which Mrs. Sorby responds, “Yes. Here in Mr. Werle’s sanctum, it’s forbidden” (Ibsen 126). This takes on a very different approach to the dramatic events than Oedipus, and it allows us to see and connect with the people as real, somewhat lazy people. This contrast between the two plays could be a cultural thing, or perhaps even a question of time period. While the ancient Greeks were dealing with wars and with famine and the destruction of their land by armies and by famine, the Norsemen in Wild Duck seem to have little of these same fears.