Ibsen at the Theatrical Crossroads of Europe: A Performance History of Henrik Ibsen’s Plays on the Romanian Stages, 1894-1947

While Ibsen’s plays were seldom performed in Romania in the first half of the 20th century, historical sources highlight his strong impact on the national theatre practice. To address this contradiction, Gianina Druta approaches the reception of Ibsen in the Romanian theatre in the period 1894-1947, combining Digital Humanities and theatre historiography. This investigation of the European theatre culture and the way in which the foreign acting and staging traditions influenced the Romanian Ibsenites provides new insights into mechanisms of aesthetic transmission. Thus, this study presents a European theatre landscape whose unpredictability and uniqueness cannot be confined to essentialist interpretations.

Gianina Druta, born in 1992, is an associate professor of drama and theatre at the Faculty of Education and International Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. She took her PhD with a thesis on Ibsen’s early performance history in the Romanian theatre. She graduated from the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Since 2015 she has been responsible for the Romanian dataset in the performance database IbsenStage. Her research activity focuses on Scandinavian literature, theatre studies and Digital Humanities.