Title: Pillars of the Community
Author: Henrik Ibsen
(Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik)
Year: 1877
Country: Norway

Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
Read: 29 March – 1 April 2026
First reading

Norwegian businessman Karsten Bernick is a well respected man about town, a pillar of the community. His shipbuilding business provides most of the jobs in his small coastal town. Plans for a new railway look set to grow his fortune even further. But his business and his public image are built on a lie. Fifteen years ago his friend Johan took the blame for a scandal that was really Karsten’s doing. In the intervening years the scandal has ballooned thanks to small-town gossip, which Karsten has turned all to his advantage. So when Johan returns from his exile in America, determined to clear his name, it looks like Karsten’s past is about to catch up with him.

Pillars of the Community (more traditionally titled The Pillars of Society) exposes the lie that many prestigious careers are built on. Karsten is involved in insider trading—buying up cheap land, then campaigning in favour of a new railway that will vastly increase the value of said land. He’s a hypocrite, plain and simple. He uses his elevated reputation to justify his unethical actions: it’s okay if he does it, because he creates jobs for the community. The fact that the scheme will also make him unfathomably wealthy is just a happy accident. And as long as he maintains his spotless reputation, the community is bound to agree.

Speaking up for truth is Lona, an unapologetic feminist who is famed in the town for cutting her hair short and wearing (gasp) men’s boots! She was once in love with Karsten, and loved by him, but he rejected her for a marriage of convenience that would advance his career. Lona then followed Johan to America and became his surrogate mother. She returns to Norway with Johan to become the voice of reason, to save Karsten’s soul from his own lies. Like many of Ibsen’s heroines she stands for truth, progress, emancipation, and freedom of spirit. Later he would write deeper, more well-rounded examples of this character type, but Lona is a great early example. She’s easily my favourite character in the play.

This is the earliest of the eight Ibsen plays I’ve read so far. It deals with many of Ibsen’s recurring themes: people haunted by secrets from their past; unearned privilege; lies and hypocrisy; women’s place in modern society; the evils of capitalism; and the tension between tradition and progress. He would tackle all these topics with greater depth and nuance in later plays, but this is still a very enjoyable play in its own right. However the sudden happy ending, where Karsten undergoes a Scrooge-like metamorphosis, feels quite implausible and unearned. Overall, Pillars of the Community is an interesting and engaging play but, in my eyes, not a truly great one.