Blind Man's Buff
Henrik Ibsen: The Wild Duck
By Alan Lucien Øyen, director of The Wild Duck
In the opening scene of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, the characters play a game of Blind Man’s Buff: blindfolded, a person is spun around and poked by the giggling other players while he’s trying to catch one of them and guess their true identity.
We lie to ourselves.
When we catch ourselves in the mirror in the morning, we hold our stomach in. When we smile at each other through the window of social media, it’s a fake and filtered smile. We fictionalize and stage our lives for ourselves and one another—but are we blind to the truth?
I’m drawn to The Wild Duck because it’s perhaps Ibsen’s most personal and sincere play. The attic where The Wild Duck is played out is not unlike the attic where Ibsen himself played out the fiction of his first doll’s houses while his self-delusional father drank in order to deal with his personal and social failures. I love how willingly Ibsen shares his own feelings of entrapment within the societal expectations and personal disillusionments of his childhood. I aim for a simple staging that uses The Wild Duck as a viewfinder to our contemporary lives:
We are living through a time of utter disillusionment where reality and fiction are becoming nearly indistinguishable. Through meticulously curated social lives, we live out our own digital self-delusion while ignoring mounting debt and subscribing to unscientific health trends. We find comfort in political echo chambers while denying climate change and holding on to unhealthy relationships and unrealistic career aspirations—all the while thinking technology will solve all our problems.
The Wild Duck is rich in metaphors that harken back to our time: Hjalmar is a photographer. He spends his day retouching images and tampering with the truth. Hidden away in the attic with his little family, his daughter is going blind while his childhood friend insists on removing Hjalmar’s blindfold – opening his eyes to the truth of his life with the most tragic outcome.
Perhaps we’re all fumbling about in the dark, searching for the truth of our lives? Trying to guess who the people around us truly are.
If I were to zoom out, most of my work has revolved around fiction and reality, how they come to interplay with one another, and how the concept of staging plays a vital part in the shaping of our lives: the roles we play on and off the stage. I wish to pursue this further and into the photography studio of Hjalmar Ekdal.
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we know and yet we don’t know. Self-delusional, blindfolded, and removed from ourselves, we choose to stay blind to the truths we keep hidden in the attic. But is it time to remove the blindfold? And what happens when the “Blind man” realizes that the person he has caught in the dark is himself?