If a play set in the 1950s shows a white-bread husband saying, ‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ he will almost certainly be knobbing the secretary or hanging around men’s toilets while his wife downs gin to drown her existential anguish. (Ibsen’s own views were suitably idiotic: ‘Abolish the concept of the state, establish the principle of free will.’ He argued that ‘the minority is always right’, by which he meant what might today be called a liberal elite.13)
