Problem Play

The problem play is a form of drama that emerged during the 19th century as part of the wider movement of realism in the arts, especially following the innovations of Henrik Ibsen. 

It deals with contentious social issues through debates between the characters on stage, who typically represent conflicting points of view within a realistic social context. 

The genre had its beginnings in the work of the French dramatists Alexandre Dumas fils and Émile Augier, who adapted the then-popular formula of Eugène Scribe’s “well-made play” (q.v.) to serious subjects, creating somewhat simplistic, didactic thesis plays on subjects such as prostitution, business ethics, illegitimacy, and female emancipation. 

The problem play reached its maturity in the works of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose works had artistic merit as well as topical relevance. 

His first experiment in the genre was Love’s Comedy (published 1862), a critical study of contemporary marriage. 

He went on to expose the hypocrisy, greed, and hidden corruption of his society in a number of masterly plays: A Doll’s House portrays a woman’s escape from her childish, subservient role as a bourgeois wife; Ghosts attacks the convention that even loveless and unhappy marriages are sacred; The Wild Duck shows the consequences of an egotistical idealism; An Enemy of the People reveals the expedient morality of respectable provincial townspeople.

Critic Chris Baldick writes that the genre emerged "from the ferment of the 1890s... for the most part inspired by the example of Ibsen's realistic stage representations of serious familial and social conflicts."

The critic F. S. Boas adapted the term to characterise certain plays by William Shakespeare that he considered to have characteristics similar to Ibsen's 19th-century problem plays. As a result, the term is also used more broadly and retrospectively to describe any tragicomic dramas that do not fit easily into the classical generic distinction between comedy and tragedy.