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After many years of absence, Gregers Werle accepts an invitation to his father's house. He has long avoided the elder Werle, a wealthy industrialist, because his father had cheated on his late mother and driven her into alcoholism. Gregers has also invited Hjalmar Ekdal, his best friend from childhood, to the dinner party, where Father Werle is cultivating his relationships with the city's most important politicians and presenting his housekeeper as a potential new life partner. In conversation with Hjalmar, Gregers realizes that his father not only sent Hjalmar's father to prison over a fraud in which he himself was involved—ruining the once-wealthy family—but also set up his former mistress, Gina, with Hjalmar. For Gregers, the path forward is clear. He moves in with Hjalmar and Gina, who live with their daughter Hedvig and Hjalmar's father, to expose the lies upon which their existence is built. Gregers is convinced that learning the truth about the past and his father's machinations will help the entire Ekdal family lead a happier, more honest life.
Two years after Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People, a play about the importance of truth, he created The Wild Duck, a text that explores the value of lies. Do we need vital illusions—"life-lies"—just to be able to live? Are truth and absolute honesty always good, or can they also be destructive? And to what extent are we even allowed to interfere in the lives of others?
