Little Eyolf (Mencken Translation)

In a house by the Norwegian fjords, a family slowly destroys itself. Albert Allmers has abandoned his grand literary ambitions to devote himself to Little Eyolf, his malformed son, yet his devotion rings false. His wife Rita seethes with jealousy: first she competed with his manuscripts, then with the boy, now with his sister Asta, who has her own dangerous claim on Albert's heart. When the strange Rat-Wife lures Eyolf to the water, the child's drowning liberates nothing, only forces the three adults into a merciless reckoning. What emerges is uglier than grief: confessions of obsessive desire, of hating what you supposedly love, of loving what you cannot possess. Ibsen strips love of its nobility, revealing it as hunger, as theft, as the desperate attempt to fill an internal void with another person. A play that leaves you shaken by its ruthless clarity about what we do in the name of devotion.