Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) has been described as 'the father of modern theatre'. Most of his early plays were traditional historical dramas. After 'Peer Gynt', a fairy-tale fantasy in verse, Ibsen wrote the rest of his plays in prose, and came to be regarded as the great Naturalist dramatist.

The plays in this volume range from the once shockingly realistic Ghosts (1881), 'the play that launched a thousand ships of critical fury'; through The Wild Duck (1884) with its innovatory symbolism and its touching portrait of a fourteen-year-old girl held in thrall by her feckless father ('Where,' asked George Bernard Shaw, 'shall I find an epithet magnificent enough for The Wild Duck?'); to The Master Builder (1892), showing the semi-autobiographical relationship between an ageing genius and a dynamic young woman.
Michael Meyer's translations are 'crisp and cobweb-free, purged of verbal Victoriana' (Kenneth Tynan)

Ghosts; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder