Henrik Ibsen invented realistic theater, and now he bores. Why?

Of all the new plays to open on Broadway in 2017, the one that has been taken up most frequently by theater companies elsewhere in America is Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2. As Shaw wrote with annihilating contempt in an 1896 review of one of Ibsen’s later plays:

It was Ibsen who showed the world that it was also possible to write realistic plays about contemporary life that dealt with serious matters in a serious way—and that these plays could attract paying customers in the way that the novels of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Anthony Trollope appealed to mature minds who longed to see real life portrayed on the page. Therein, however, lies the source of our latter-day discontent with Ibsen, which is that the people who go to see serious plays today are no longer horrified by anything in A Doll’s House or Ghosts.

Source: www.commentarymagazine.com