About the work
Henrik Ibsen wrote When We Dead Awaken in Christiania in 1899, finishing the manuscript on 21 November; the play was published by Gyldendal simultaneously in Copenhagen, Christiania, Stockholm and Berlin on 22 December 1899, in an edition of 14,000 copies due to heavy advance orders. After a reading at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in December 1899, the first full staged production took place on 26 January 1900 at the Hoftheater in Stuttgart, ahead of the Norwegian premiere.
Plot
Ageing sculptor Arnold Rubek meets his former muse Irene again at a Norwegian spa resort; she had modelled for his masterpiece ‘The Day of Resurrection’ and left him because he refused to see her as anything more. While Rubek’s young wife Maja turns to a hunter, Rubek and Irene grow close again and climb a mountain together. An avalanche kills them both.
Cultural significance
Ibsen himself called this, his last play, an ‘epilogue’ to the sequence of works begun with A Doll’s House. Contemporaries saw it as a demanding, stagecraft-defying summation of his career; it has since stood as his dramatic testament on art, life and forfeited fulfilment.