Returning after years to his homeland, Gregers discovers that the woman he suspected of being his father's lover has married his old friend Yalmar and they have a daughter together. Pursuing the "ultimate ideal" and convinced that only absolute honesty leads to it, he decides to reveal the old relationship to his friend, thus creating suspicions about the child's paternity. Another family friend, Dr. Relling, warns him: some illusions are vital.
In "The Wild Duck," "the world of deceit and hypocrisy parades on one side, and some 'executors' on the other. And, literally, this world is set up in the excerpt," writes the translator of Ibsen, Herkos Apostolidis, in his rich in comments and introduction. "The executors, however, are indeed idealists to the extreme, but full of flaws, ordinary little people, without determination, and without a broader structure, spirituality, or purpose in life." The characters: familiar, family, and surroundings.
Ibsen does not judge and does not seek catharsis. He breaks the "golden shell" of institutions, such as the family, and exposes the hypocrisy that covers their myths, while showing at the same time that even the "good" can become more harmful than the "bad."

"The Wild Duck" is Ibsen's seventh masterpiece translated for the series of the complete works of the great Norwegian published consistently by Gutenberg editions, a series that, as emphasized by Kostas Georgousopoulos, is a "valuable, contemporary, dramatically informed, highly theatrical, linguistically rich and provocative offer of general Education, a scenic challenge and a supplication of directorial, acting, and visual imagination" that leads "to artesian wells of spiritual oasis."