Review; Laughter and Civility: The Theater of Emma Gad

Authors

• Susan Brantly

Keywords

theater, feminism, modernism

Abstract

When Emma Gad is remembered in Denmark today, it is as the Danish version of Miss Manners, due to her book Takt og Tone: Hvordan vi omgaas (Tact and Tone: How We Act in Society, 1918), which is apparently still in print. However, as University of Texas, Austin professor Lynn Wilkinson so ably illustrates, Emma Gad was much more than that. Gad was a highly successful playwright and cultural mediator in the Copenhagen of Edvard and Georg Brandes. Wilkinson’s book offers a comprehensive look at the life and work of this important Danish woman playwright and seeks to reinstate Gad into the repertory of turn-of-the-century European dramatists, alongside Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Her short plays can be considered modernist avantgarde theater, demonstrating that the genre was not invented solely by male playwrights, such as Strindberg and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gad used comedy as a tool for social criticism, not a particularly common tactic in Scandinavia but fully familiar to Shaw and Wilde.

Recommended Citation

Brantly, Susan (2023) "Review; Laughter and Civility: The Theater of Emma Gad," The Bridge: Vol. 46: No. 2, Article 7.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thebridge/vol46/iss2/7