Ghosts – Henrik Ibsen, 1881 ★★

Something Rotten in Norway

A sensation when it first hit the stage, Ibsen’s Ghosts is hard to enjoy now. You can appreciate how the play pushed boundaries in the 19^th century, giving voice to forbidden ideas; today it feels melodramatic and forced – a four-hankie weeper about a tortured artist and his ever-faithful mother stuck together in the repressive backwaters of western Norway.

There’s even a light-comic rustic and a self-righteous parson on hand to lend a Wuthering Heights flavor. Regardless of its creakiness, Ghosts has relevance. It did make Ibsen an even bigger name in his own time, and remains as well-known as all but a handful of his plays.

It is set in the home of Helene Alving, a prosperous widow in the process of opening an orphanage funded by her late husband’s estate. Her son, Oswald, an artist, is home after a long sojourn in France. His bohemian temperament unsettles a minister named Manders on hand for the orphanage opening, but Mrs. Alving supports her son in his philosophy as in other things. But when Oswald reveals an interest in the Alving family maid, Regine, it triggers a dispute between mother and son, as well as a revelation, one of many that fateful evening.

Subtitled “A Domestic Drama in Three Acts,” Ghosts is actually a rough translation from the original Danish (the language Ibsen actually wrote his plays in, though he was Norwegian). In Danish the title is Gengangere, literally “revenants” or “ones who return,” a title Ibsen preferred. Still, the word “ghosts” captures what the play is about, and is explained by Mrs. Alving in one of the play’s most notable passages:

MRS. ALVING: Ghosts. When I heard Regine and Oswald in there, it was just like seeing ghosts. But then I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts, Pastor Manders, every one of us. It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.  

Fear of light is a theme of the play. Ibsen’s stage directions emphasize the darkness of the Norwegian setting, and in Manders we have an example of a benighted cleric who knows what he knows and expects others to defer to his orthodoxy. This could have made him one-dimensional, except Ibsen does develop him in an interesting way. He apparently had a brief, likely unconsummated fling with Mrs. Alving a year after she was married; and suffers enormous insecurity about how the community perceives him.

Pastor Manders’ anxiety is such that he pressures Mrs. Alving not to take out any insurance on the orphanage she is bequesting her town. “It would be so terribly easy to interpret things as meaning that neither you nor I had a proper faith in Divine Providence,” Manders tells her.

Will Keen as Pastor Manders and Lesley Manville as Mrs. Alving discuss the disposition of the orphanage in Act One of Ghosts, from a 2017 U. K. touring production then in Sydney, Australia. Photo by Julieta Cervantes of The New York Times. Image from http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2039704/ghosts-by-henrik-ibsen-at-belvoir-st-theatre-sydney.

This is an odd request for a couple of reasons. One is we just heard Helene tell Manders that she was a freethinker who doesn’t hold with conventional beliefs. Perhaps Manders thinks others might know this, which makes him more sensitive to the point, but it is an odd request to make given both her mindset and her investment.

The other reason: Churches and synagogues take out insurance all the time. It was standard policy then and now, a precaution against both natural disaster and human mischief. Surely Ibsen won’t now have the orphanage burn down; that would be too much. Especially not on the same night Mrs. Alving and Manders have this conversation.

Manders’ hold over Mrs. Alving is hard to understand; he shows up at her house and soon gives her and her son whatfor. The parson is actually the indirect benefactor of Helene’s gift of her husband’s legacy, as he will play a central role in the orphanage’s oversight. He is even to speak at the opening ceremony the next day.

But is he happy? Don’t bother Manders about being happy.

MANDERS: All this demanding to be happy in life, it’s all part of this same wanton idea. What right have people to happiness? No, we have our duty to do, Mrs. Alving! And your duty was to stand by the man you had chosen, and to whom you were bound by sacred ties.

This ties into the central theme of the play, the bogusness of conventional morality as exemplified by marriage. Mrs. Alving didn’t only leave her husband for Manders, she moved into his parsonage and attempted to kindle a relationship. Manders is full of pious self-congratulation over his expressed forbearance in the matter:

MANDERS: It was my life’s greatest victory, Helene; victory over myself.

MRS. ALVING: It was a crime against us both.

If she was trying to tell Manders they should have been an item, I didn’t catch it in my Oxford University Press translation. Her main point is that Captain Alving was never much of a husband. She offers a number of revelations regarding his character, which form the body of the play and suggest the title. The randy captain may be dead, but he lives on both in memory and in the blood of his progeny.

This brings us to Oswald, Ghosts’ central, tragic figure. He has fewer lines in the play than either Mrs. Alving or Manders, but dominates the proceedings, for better or worse.

Oswald (Kenneth Branagh) is comforted by his mother, Mrs. Alving (Judi Dench) in a still from the 1987 BBC Theatre Night production of Ghosts. Image from http://www.mtc.com.au/backstage/2014/06/from-the-reading-room-ibsen-jag/

Oswald, like Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, is one of those all-or-nothing romantic heroes prone to philosophizing and self-pity. When we first see him, he is smoking his late father’s pipe, a portent of things to come. His mother is unsettled by this sight, as she doesn’t care to think of the paternal connection. She would rather discuss the human right of happiness with her son:

OSWALD: Well, all I mean is that people here are brought up to believe that work is a curse, and a sort of punishment for their sins; and that life is some kind of miserable affair, which the sooner we are done with the better for everybody.

MRS. ALVING: A vale of tears, I know. And we do our damnedest to make it that.

OSWALD: But people elsewhere simply won’t have that. Nobody really believes in ideas of that sort any more. In other countries they think it’s tremendous fun just to be alive at all…

For a play that talks so much of happiness, Ghosts is not fun. Tragedy shows up early and often. The only glint of humor comes from the rustic, Jacob Engstrand, a carpenter working at the orphanage who dreams of setting up a den of ill-repute and is trying to get his estranged daughter Regine to work there. Watching him spin Manders again and again on this point is clever and amusing.

As the play draws on, Oswald’s deeper problems blow up, and with it, Ibsen’s gentle subtlety. The play becomes a series of big declarations. He tells his mother he has lost his energy, his drive to paint. He wants only to drink, smoke, and make fair Regine his companion. This upsets Mrs. Alving not only because a good maid is hard to find but she knows Regine’s big secret makes a union not only impractical but rather icky.

But Oswald has a secret of his own, which amounts to Ghosts’ most awesome revelation and what was, in its time, the element which shocked audiences most. It took a decade for Ghosts to hit London, and when it did, the Daily Telegraph hit back, calling it “an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly.”

Playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts between two even-better-known plays of his, 1879's A Doll's House and 1882's An Enemy Of The People. Like those plays, the central tension rests between individuals and social norms. Image from https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/henrik-ibsen-198.php.

Today, Oswald’s secret is not so much horrifying as confusing. [SPOILER ALERT] In essence, we learn he has contracted syphilis, apparently inherited from his father’s transgressions.

How this could have happened is unclear. One theory suggests the Captain gave it to Oswald via his pipe, which he encouraged the boy to try when he was seven. The prevailing theory is that Oswald was born with it, like a recessive gene. Syphilis doesn’t work this way, but this wasn’t understood in 1881. As the news comes to us via Oswald, who says a doctor in Paris told him (“He said: the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children”), it’s possibly the doctor’s mistake or Oswald’s evasion for something he did himself. [SPOILER END]

Thematically, the inheritance idea not only works in keeping with the play’s title but with the business of the play itself. The idea of legacy in all its permutations is at the forefront.

Staging Ghosts was a problem back in the 1880s and remains so today. It was first performed in Chicago, gradually finding its way to Europe and to Ibsen’s homeland. Over the years it has been produced many times; one 1982 production was Kevin Spacey’s Broadway debut.

On YouTube is a production made a few years later for the BBC, starring Judi Dench as Mrs. Alving, Kenneth Branagh as Oswald, and Michael Gambon as Manders. As well-acted as it is, the production is faithful to a fault. Branagh exposes the difficulty of playing Oswald in anything approaching a natural way, while Dench’s mother character veers between stiff and warm.

The King of Norway reportedly greeted Ibsen once by telling him Ghosts was a bad play, which was too harsh. It is often affecting, and the scenes between Manders and Mrs. Alving show Ibsen’s faculty for keeping multiple philosophical discussions going at once. But what a tragedy sump it becomes! Not something I want to denounce, as it does work in a clenched way, but not something I want to see or read again.