Ibsen's genius

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Interview with Robert Bly,

by Øivind H. Solheim

ØS: I noticed that somewhere you say that the realistic plays show Ibsen’s talent, but Peer Gynt shows his genius.
RB: There is a range of it, you know, the joy of the whole thing. – Geniuses are known to be very playful, and that doesn’t come too much out in the plays in the living room.
This is the last play where he I rejoicing in his own genius before he goes and does the plays that they want from him. This is Ibsen’s masterpiece, yes I think so, then it was a great joy for me to do it.

It was commissioned 20 years ago by a producer in New York, then he ran out of money – and the first act is remained there. Mark Rylance heard about it- he ran the Globe theatre for 20 years, he wrote to the Guthrie’s and said: I want to commission this to Robert Bly, and I’ll come over and play the lead, they said: Oh wah! We’ll do it!

ØS: 20 years ago you did the first act. – Had you been taken by Peer Gynt also before that
before the Men's Gatherings? I can see many parallels between Peer Gynt and the Men’s Mouvement.
RB: That didn’t happen to me. I didn’t have in mind people that were joyful like Peer Gynt. I had in mind all sorts of men who were depressed, lonely and in bad shape. So those are the ones that I try to help with Iron John. And I told them – well going up there, it could be called in six stages. And people, men could come to me and say to me, well I am stuck in the second stage for 30 years. So that’s the kind of work we did at that time. I still do something. I was as surprised as anyone when I realized.

The Sibling Society

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Interview with Robert Bly, 18 February 2008

ØS: -The word sibling -.
RB: -Yes, that means there’s no father. We are all brothers and sisters. That’s a kind of society in which everyone is equal, they are all watching television at night, and no one really honours their father, doesn’t really honour the mother. They ignore their grand-fathers and their grand-mothers. That is the Sibling Society.
ØS: -And how long has this been like this?
RB: -Oh I don’t know – 50 years probably.
ØS: Why has it come like that?
RB: Because we want to be children. We don’t wanna be adults.
ØS: How come?
RB: It’s too much work to be an adult, and we don’t want any standards, we don’t want any one to say: You’re acting childishly. We wanna everyone to act childishly. And then we all feel at home. So it could also be called the father killing society.
ØS: You say somewhere that women have found their place or have raised their autority in the women’s movement. What do you think about the women’s movement. - Have they been your adversaries?
RB: Oh, there were some at the beginning. They were mad at me because I did a lot of writing about women’s things for a long while, and they said, now he’s abandoning us, now he’s writing about men, so he must be one of those men who just wants power over women. But then – once in a while – I would have meetings, there would be like three to four hundred men. And one time I looked up and there was a woman – no question there was a woman disguised as a man. And she had been sent as a spy by the women’s movement to see what I was doing.
ØS: So you didn’t have women to come to these gatherings?
RB: No, because in the first place men don’t have a chance to talk together with each other. And there is no place it could take place. So I set up a place
So then 80 could come and say anything they wanted to. Most of them spoke about missing their father. And then the women said:
- Don’t you miss your mother?
- Well, that’s not the point, I miss my father!
So that would be a groupe of men with invisible fathers. And occasionally a father would bring his son, or a son would bring his father. So there wasn’t anything anti-female in it. So they began to figure that out.
Well because men don’t have a chance to talk together with each other.
The women often give their daughters more responsibilities than the men would give their sons, and I don’t know the reason for that. I guess men feel there’s a danger they won’t be loved, so they try to be soft with their sons. So that’s kind of difficult situation. Hard on the boys.