Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism with an understanding of social responsibility and individual psychology. His earliest major plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were large-scale verse dramas, but with Pillars of the Community (1877) he began to explore contemporary issues. There followed A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882). A richer understanding of the complexity of human impulses marks such later works as The Wild Duck (1885), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), while the imminence of mortality overshadows his last great plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).Rebecca Lenkiewicz's The Night Season premiered at the National Theatre in 2004, received the Critics' Circle Most Promising Playwright Award and was nominated for the Charles Wintour Evening Standard Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Her Naked Skin premiered at the National Theatre in 2008, the first play by a living female playwright to be staged on the Olivier. Other plays include The Painter (Arcola Theatre), The Typist ( Riverside Studios), The Lioness (The Tricycle), That Almost Unnameable Lust, Shoreditch Madonna, Blue Moon over Poplar (Soho Theatre), A Soldier's Tale (Old Vic), Invisible Mountains (National Theatre Education), Faeries (Royal Opera House), Justitia (Peacock Theatre) and adaptations of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (Arcola and Manhattan Theatre Club, USA) and Ghosts (Arcola). For BBC Radio 4: Fighting For Words, Caravan of Desire, Sarah and Ken (Special Commendation for the Tinniswood Award), Dracula and The Winter House.
