Rosmersholm (reading)

When I first heard that we were going to read an entire play, I was discouraged to say the least. This was the first time that I had heard of Rosmersholm, by Henrik Ibsen, and I cant say that I was excited at all to read it. The more I read, the more confused I became. The class discussion did, however, clear things up. The term realism seems to be the theme of the play in the fact that the characters roles seemed to be that of the lives of everyday people. The character Rebecca West seemed to stick out in my mind the most. In the beginning of the play her role seemed subtle and harmless but as the play unfolds, she becomes entangled in a complicated web of lies that eventually end up with her suicide with John Rosmer. Another aspect of the script was the intricate detail that Ibsen provided. The amount of details provided almost made the script to hard to read. Every movement and everything that the characters were seeing was explained in the most complex fashion. The more I read the more I wanted to see how this would come into play when we actually got to see the play. Another issue that I noticed when comparing my thoughts of the play to that of the discussion was the since of eeriness that I couldn’t get out of reading the text. The majority of the class discussions were based on the fact that this was a “ghost story” if you will, and the entire time I was reading it, I never got that feeling.