Dramaturg’s Notes on “Ghosts”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - August 2009

Dramaturg’s Notes
by James Leverett

“MY BOOK BELONGS TO THE FUTURE”

The title is taken from a letter Henrik Ibsen wrote to his publisher in 1882, a year after Ghosts was published and the same year it received its stage premiere. To say the least, those who read and saw his play did not apprehend the statement’s mil significance immediately. The playwright’s prophesy reaches further and deeper than they could have imagined. Ghosts is one of those rare works of art that change how we understand our world and express our understanding.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that its appearance caused arguably the biggest scandal in dramatic history. Its examination of marriage, religion, social structure and other crucial issues shook the pillars of society to their affluent, entitled cores. So deep and wide was the heap of vituperation piled upon the play that William Archer, one of the author’s earliest and most effective advocates and among the first to translate his works into English, published a list of the most bilious: “an open drain,” “a loathsome sore unbandaged,” “a dirty act done publicly,” “revoltingly suggestive,” “blasphemous.”

Scandinavian bookshops returned their copies of the first edition to the publishers and it took ten years for it to sell out. The 1882 premiere took place on another continent, in Chicago. It was performed in Norwegian by Danish and Norwegian amateurs for audiences of Scandinavian immigrants, and the successful production toured cities in the Midwest. Surprisingly, by the time the play opened in Sweden the next year, the scandal seemed to have abated and the presentation was welcomed with intense interest and enthusiasm, a reception that continued in Denmark and finally Norway itself. Its director August Lindberg described the premiere: “When the curtain was raised, it felt as though the public held its breath. The scenes of the play unfolded in a silence worthy of a spiritual seance. When the final curtain fell, the silence continued for a good while before the ovations started.” But this reverent attitude did not necessarily continue as Ghosts insisted its way into the consciousness of the rest of Europe. The birth of the modem was inevitable but not easy.

All of Ibsen’s plays argue the pressing ideas of his time: heredity, environment, the nature of the family, the nature of nature, economics, class, gender and sexuality. These concerns and their accompanying confusions are just as vital now, but Ibsen unfolded them with 19th-century rhetorical formality and politesse. The director Anders Cato and I have not moved it from its time and place in Norway towards the end of the 19th century. To tune it to our ears and understanding, we don’t use contemporary jargon but we do strive for contemporary fluidity and speed. Some of it is as close to the original as English can come. Some is distilled, rearranged, expanded, renovated.

As we worked to translate Ghosts into our own idiom and rhythms, we were drawn into Ibsen’s journey as he wrote his play. Paradoxically, often a pioneer in the arts steps backward towards disused forms in order to leap forward into new territory. Contemporary theater offered Ibsen many rickety foundations on which to build his new drama: the so-called thesis drama in which social problems are argued out to suit the conservative bourgeois taste, the formulaically constructed well-made-play, and the boulevard thriller. All of these 19th-century warhorses are stabled in Ghosts but the genius Ibsen redirected them into the future by using their innate theatrical energy to explore the urgencies of contemporary reality with uncompromising honesty.

As with Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and other masters of the time, his style has been called realistic. But behind the detailed surface and familiar structure there exists a much more imposing and enduring model, the classical tragedy of the Greeks. As we loosened Ghosts from the stage conventions of Ibsen’s day, the structure behind the structures became ever clearer. As Aristotle tells us, at the center of tragedy is action and on a single action all else in a tragedy depends: plot, character, thought, everything we see, everything we hear. It brings a powerful unity to the play and moves it forward with inexorable speed. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King became our guide. The action of Oedipus the play and Oedipus the central character of the play is to know—to know who or what brings misery into the world and, by finding out, to know the self. That drive to know is what makes Oedipus tragic. It also makes him human and universal.

Keep that action in mind when you watch Ghosts. Think of it as you follow each character as her or his fate shifts while the play moves forward. Consider it as the stage environment wavers between darkness and light. Examine it in regard to an author who fiercely insisted that art must know the world from which it comes and express that knowledge without compromise. And most importantly contemplate it as you, the member of the audience, experience the play personally as it unfolds in time and space—and in your consciousness.

“To live is to war with trolls in the vaults of the heart and to write: that is to sit in judgment over one’s soul.” —Henrik Ibsen

“Don’t use the foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have a good Norwegian word, ‘lies.’” —Henrik Ibsen

“The keynote is to be: The prolific growth of our intellectual life, in literature, art, etc. —and in contrast to this: the whole of mankind gone astray.” —Ibsen, a note to himself while writing Ghosts

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