The inspiration behind Rosmersholm
 
Ibsen based Johannes Rosmer on an old acquaintance of his, Count Carl Snoilsky, while Rebecca West bore certain resemblances to Snoilsky’s second wife.
 
In his youth Snoilsky had been a gifted poet but after he married and joined the civil service his creativity ended. In 1879, however, at the age of 38 he left the Foreign Office, divorced his wife, married one of her relatives and went into voluntary exile. Three years after the divorce Snoilsky’s wife died of consumption and many people blamed him for her death.

He, however, had found himself able to write again, and in a style very different from that of his youth. He had become absorbed by the class struggle and the spirit of revolution, longing to enter into contact with the common people. Ibsen felt that the new wife's sensitivity and strength of character were largely responsible for Snoilsky's regeneration as a human being.
 
Ibsen’s notes that accompanied the first draft of Rosmersholm attest to this influence:
 
'He, a refined aristocratic character, who has switched to a liberal viewpoint and been ostracized by all his former friends and acquaintances. A widower; had been unhappily married to a half-mad melancholic who ended by drowning herself.
She, the governess of his two daughters, emancipated, hot-blooded, somewhat ruthless beneath a refined exterior. Is regarded by their acquaintances as the evil spirit of the house; an object of suspicion and gossip.'

Stage design

The stage set for the Almeida production of Rosmersholm is strongly influenced by the evocative paintings of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, a painter roughly contemporary with Ibsen and whose work is shortly to go on display in an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (28 June - 7 Sept 2008).

'Setting the scene', an article from the Royal Academy of Arts magazine (no. 99, Summer 2008), discusses the inspiration Hammershøi has provided in stage productions of Ibsen's work