CRIMSON PLAYGOER

"When, We Dead Awaken" is Ibsen's last play, but it is assuredly not his finest. Written at an advanced age, as was this drama of martial incompatibility and spiritual resurrection, the last dramatic moment of so great a man, was, obviously, not the best. The play, moreover, is a sort of apologia of an artist's life, the artist in question being, without doubt, Ibsen himself, and most apologias are over talkative. It is a notable tribute to the genius of a great writer that this loquacious effort, as presented last night by the Studio Players, should have aroused so enthusiastic a response from its Cambridge and University audience.

Not that the artist gets the better of the argument in "When We Dead Awaken." Lovers of Ibsen will recall the rather cloudy complications resolving themselves "on the heights" of the Scandinavian mountains, between a middleaged sculptor, his youthful disillusioned wife, and the Strange Lady, Irene, exmodel and "grande dame" whom the sculptor had thrown over long ago for the sake of his art. It is the old dramatist's contribution to the eternal dilemma of the love of woman versus the love of art. Having chosen the latter and abandoned Irene, the sculptor discovers that, in killing his love, he has also killed his art. None the less these disastrous lovers are in the end reunited, and in death they are not divided. The mute nun murmers her "pax" over their falling bodies, and one seems to hear a voice out of the cloud in the great closing line from one of the earlier plays: "He is a God of Love."

Despite its relative incoherence, it is a moving play, bathed in that keen atmosphere of sunlight setting on northern mountains which is typical, of Ibsen in his last and profoundly poetic phase. All things considered, the performance, Friday evening, was remarkable for its delicate teamwork. All the players were competent and sympathetic, but first laurels should most certainly go to Miss Kim as Irene for a performance of astonishing beauty. C. W.