Lucy Komisar
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“Ghosts” is Hendrik Ibsen’s searing denunciation of 19th century bourgeois malevolence and hypocrisy “Ghosts.” https://www.lct.org/shows/ghosts/ Moral hypocrisy never goes out of style, and Norwegian playwright Hendrik Ibsen was a master at demolishing it. “Ghosts,” then called Gengangere (“the ones who return,”) published in 1881 and presented at that time in Norway and the US, aroused the fury of the smug burghers on both sides of the Atlantic with its searing portrait of an honorable gentleman as sexual predator. Perhaps because Ibsen not only took on forbidden subjects such as sexual abuse and venereal disease, but because pillars of society such as clergy were shown to share guilt for the evil done to “polite” society’s victims. Ibsen, considered the father of modern theater, wrote this psychological drama with a strong dose of feminism, which was the knife to cut through the arrogance of the self-righteous, corrupt elite. Of course, Ibsen also wrote “A Doll’s House,” “Hedda Gabler” and “An Enemy of the People” in the same vein. Only Shakespeare is performed more frequently world-wide.
The play, with a new translation by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, is given a taught, compelling production by director Jack O’Brien at Lincoln Center. It’s a tough play, not one you love but one you have to see. It takes place on an island off the Norwegian coast, inside a spare living room with a long handsome wood table and a few mismatched but elegant chairs under a graceful chandelier. Rain pours outside the floor-to-ceiling window. (Set by John Lee Beatty). The household is dominated by Helena Alving (Lily Rabe, cool, stern, straight), whose husband died ten years before, after 15 years of marriage. She seems almost not of the world she inhabits.
Engstrand (Hamish Linklater, married to Rabe in real life), a carpenter who drinks too much, is crude, gruff and loud. Linklater brings depth to his part. He has a goal, to make a home for sailors. His daughter Regina (Ella Beatty) is a maid in the Alving household; he wants her to work at the sailors’ home, but she wants to live in town instead of on the lonely island and is looking for suitable employer. The stifling rules are reflected by Pastor Manders (Billy Crudup, who sometimes seems overwrought in the role). The house has books but, we are told, nothing people don’t already think. When he lashes out at some books, she points out, “You have no idea what you’re condemning.”
Helena gives him control of the funds she is donating the build an orphanage on their property, dedicated to her late husband. Manders is against insurance for the building, because it means a lack of faith in God. You know where that is going. Yes, he is a fool. Costume designer Jess Goldstein has put everyone in black, which seems normal in that northern clime. Then Oswald (Levon Hawke, a soft-spoken charmer), Helena’s 25-year-old artist son, arrives, and he is all in white, ghostly, and that is symbolic. He has been living in Paris. In fact, Helena sent him to school abroad when he was only seven.
The truth about his life comes out slowly, as if it were a vulture circling prey. His body had been infected by his father’s dissipation, which was covered up by Manders and the elites. Helena was trapped by the stifling duty against joy. She wanted to leave her husband, but the clergyman talked her out of it: “marital obligations.” He insisted that she “resented authority.” Meanwhile Oswald talks honestly against the criticism of people “living in sin,” says, “It costs a lot to be married….They are young and in love.”
Finally, Helena erupts in fury, appears to be enjoying the moment, proclaiming that her husband died wanton and debouched. She saw him in bed with the maid. But Manders and the town’s elite looked the other way. As the story unwinds, each of the characters’ lives and fates will be revealed intertwined, with “the sins of the fathers” taking on horrific reality in this 19th century melodramatic pot boiler.
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