Ghosts (play)

A performance of Ghosts in Berlin, 1983.

Ghosts (original Danish title: Gengangere) is a play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was written in 1881 and first staged in 1882. Like many of Ibsen's better-known plays, Ghosts is a scathing commentary on 19th-century morality.

The play was originally written in Danish. The word "Gengangere" is not Norwegian. The Norwegian word is "Gjengangere" but the translation is reasonable, literally translated as "again walkers". Norwegians also use the term about people who frequently show up in the same places, be they pubs, parties or first nights or other places or occasions.

Writing

Ghosts was written during the autumn of 1881 and was published in December of the same year. As early as November 1880, when Ibsen was living in Rome, he was meditating on a new play to follow A Doll's House. When he went to Sorrento, in the summer of 1881, he was hard at work upon it. It was finished by the end of November 1881 and published in Copenhagen on 13 December. Its world stage première was on 20 May 1882 in Norwegian in Chicago.

The translated title of 'Ghosts' is actually misleading compared to the Danish and Norwegian titles. The correct translation would have been 'Revenants'.

Plot summary

Helen Alving is about to dedicate an orphanage she has built in the memory of her dead husband, Captain Alving. She reveals to her spiritual advisor, Pastor Manders, that she has hidden the evils of her marriage, and has built the orphanage to deplete her husband's wealth so that their son, Oswald, might not inherit anything from him. Pastor Manders had previously advised her to return to her husband despite his philandering, and she followed his advice in the belief that her love for her husband would eventually reform him. However her husband's philandering continued until his death, and Mrs. Alving was unable to leave him prior to his death for fear of being shunned by the community. During the action of the play she discovers that her son Oswald (whom she had sent away so that he would not be corrupted by his father) is suffering from inherited syphilis, and (worse) has fallen in love with Regina Engstrand, Mrs. Alving's maid, who is revealed to be an illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving, and thereby Oswald's own half-sister.

The play concludes with Mrs. Alving having to decide whether or not to euthanize her son Oswald in accordance with his wishes. Her choice is left unknown.

Characters

• Mrs. Helene Alving, a widow
• Oswald Alving, her son, a painter
• Pastor Manders
• Jacob Engstrand, a carpenter
• Regina Engstrand believes she is the daughter of Jacob Engstrand, but is actually Captain Alving's child. She is also Mrs. Alving's maid.
• Captain Alving, never on stage due to being deceased, but is spoken of.

Objectives

There were many lines in A Doll's House which might be taken as indication of what Ibsen's new play would be. Instead of the general query, “Did Nora return to her children?”, Ibsen put the stress on the problem of what would have happened to Nora's children had she and Helmer persisted in living the life they were accustomed to — a life of lies and subterfuges. The moral rottenness of Oswald Alving, his degenerate relationship with Regina, the serving maid, who proves to be in the end his half-sister, are the direct product of the moral unsavoriness of Captain Alving, whose past life has been covered through the moral smugness of his wife, acting under the advice of the conventional minister, Pastor Manders. If Dr. Rank, in A Doll's House, was suffering from the sins of his fathers, Oswald Alving is the product of the moral degeneracy of his father and the moral weakness of his mother. Thus, Ibsen's Ghosts becomes an answer to the question whether Nora had a right to leave her children when she did.

Ibsen sought to show the gradual development of Mrs. Alving to that point where she reacts against the spiritual conventionality of Manders, and refuses any longer to respect or protect the memory of her husband, whose life was to have such an evil effect upon Oswald's physical and moral character. When, finally, in a revolting scene between Oswald and Regina, suggesting in its degeneracy what must have taken place between Captain Alving and Regina's mother, we at last get the awakening of Mrs. Alving to the unsound foundation upon which her family life had been resting all these years, Mrs. Alving's regeneration, we know, has come too late. Oswald has a final attack and the play ends with him asking for 'the sun', meaning the truth.

Productions

Hedvig Winterhjelm as Mrs. Alving and August Lindberg as Osvald in the 1883 Swedish performance.

Ghosts was not performed in the theatre until May 1882, when a Danish touring company produced it in the Aurora Turner Hall in Chicago. Ibsen disliked the translator William Archer's use of the word "Ghosts" as the play's title, whereas the Norwegian "Gengangere" would be more accurately translated as "The Revenants", which literally means "The Ones who Return".

The play received its first performance in Sweden at Helsingborg on 22 August 1883.

The play achieved a single private London performance on 13 March 1891 at the Royalty Theatre. The Lord Chamberlain's Office censorship was avoided by the formation of a subscription-only Independent Theatre Society, which included George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and Henry James among its members.

Ghosts was first produced in New York City on 5 January 1894, and by the New York Independent Theatre, in 1899, with Mary Shaw as Mrs. Alving. Alla Nazimova, with Paul Orleneff gave a notable production of Ghosts in a small room in the Lower East Side. When Nazimova was a student in Russia she wanted to “play Regina for my graduation piece at the dramatic school at Moscow, but they would not let me. Ghosts was at that time prohibited by the censor, because it reflects on the Church.”

The most recent Broadway revival ran from 30 August to 2 October 1982 at the Brooks Atkinson Theater and starred Kevin Spacey in his Broadway debut as Oswald. The cast also included Edward Binns, John Neville (who also directed the production) as Pastor Manders, Liv Ullmann as Mrs. Alving and Jane Murray as Regina.

The latest London production enjoyed a two-month run at the Almeida Theatre from 26 September 2013; directed by Richard Eyre, it featured Lesley Manville, Jack Lowden, Will Keen, Charlene McKenna and Brian McCardie. The production transferred to Trafalgar Studios on 9 December 2013.

A touring U.K. production designed by Simon Higlett and inspired by Edvard Munch's original stage designs for a 1906 staging in Berlin began performances at Kingston's Rose Theatre 19 September 2013 prior to an official opening on 25 September. Directed by Stephen Unwin, the cast included Patrick Drury as Pastor Manders, Florence Hall as Regina, Kelly Hunter as Mrs Alving and Mark Quartley as Oswald.

Reactions

Much like A Doll's House, Ghosts was deliberately sensational. What most offended Ibsen's contemporaries was what they regarded as its shocking indecency, its more than frank treatment of a forbidden topic. An English critic was later to describe it as "a dirty deed done in public," and to many it must have seemed simply shocking rather than in any profound intellectual sense revolutionary.

At the time, the mere mention of venereal disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of morality had no protection against it was beyond the pale. Mrs. Alving's is not the noble life which Victorians believed would result from fulfilling one's duty rather than following one's desires. Those idealized beliefs are only the "ghosts" of the past, haunting the present.

The production of Ghosts scandalised Norwegian society of the day and Ibsen was strongly criticised. In 1898 when Ibsen was presented to King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway, at a dinner in Ibsen's honour, the King told Ibsen that Ghosts was not a good play. After a pause, Ibsen exploded "Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!"

The following quotes are a collection of remarks regarding the play from a variety of newspapers and sources, written at the time that the play had its debut.

"Ibsen's positively abominable play entitled Ghosts....An open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly....Gross, almost putrid indecorum....Literary carrion.... Crapulous stuff" - Daily Telegraph

"Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous ....Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent." - Daily Chronicle

"Morbid, unhealthy and disgusting story....A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman." – Lloyd's

"Nauseating and menacing... Infects the unsuspecting audience member with the same syphilitic disease of the mind that so afflicts Oswald." – Ockham's Quarterly

"Lugubrious diagnosis of sordid impropriety....Characters are prigs, pedants and profligates....Morbid caricatures.... Maunderings of nookshotten Norwegians" – Black and White

"As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre....dull and disgusting....Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel." – Era

"Ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste, in exact proportion to their nastiness" – Sporting and Dramatic News

"Ugly, nasty, discordant, and downright dull.... A gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes" – Gentlewoman

"The socialistic and the sexless....The unwomanly women, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats....Educated and muck-ferreting dogs.... Effeminate men and male women..... They all of them–men and women alike–know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing.... The Lord Chamberlain [the censor] left them alone to wallow in Ghosts.... Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his works.... A wave of human folly" – Truth

Bibliography

• Book Background, Penguins Classics, Henrik Ibsen: Ghosts and Other Plays ISBN 0-14-044135-2

External links

• Ghosts at Project Gutenberg (translated by R. Farquharson Sharp)
• Ghosts at Project Gutenberg (translated by William Archer)
• Ghosts study guide, themes, quotes, teacher resources
• "Ghosts" audio drama version by the McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse
• Ghosts novelization of the play by Kevin Flinn, released in March 2011

2009 play

• Details of the 2009 production of Ghosts at the Bolton Octagon, United Kingdom