Henrik Johan Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), who spent twenty-seven years living in voluntary self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany away from conservative Norway, single-handedly dragged European theater out of 19th-century drawing-room melodrama into fearless modern realism. His 1867 dramatic poem Peer Gynt (featuring Edvard Grieg's immortal score) captured the folkloric soul of Norway.

In 1879, Ibsen caused an international moral earthquake with A Doll's House (*Et dukkehjem*). When the protagonist Nora Helmer chooses her own human dignity over her patronizing husband and children, walking out into the night and slamming the front door, the reverberation was described by George Bernard Shaw as 'the door slam heard round the world'. Subsequent daring works like Ghosts (tackling hereditary syphilis) and Hedda Gabler founded modern psychological drama.