some questions to ibsen about his ghosts
by
Douglas Messerli
Henrik
Ibsen Ghosts / the production I saw was a BBC television production in
its Theater Night Series, originally broadcast on June 14, 1987
I
must presume that nearly everyone who has and is currently reading my USTheater,
Opera, and Performance website and the many volumes of my annually produced
My Year will know something, and may even have possibly read Ibsen’s 1881
drama, which had its premier in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois in 1882,
performed by a traveling Danish theater company, made up of mostly amateur performers.
This play, if you recall, is not a work about
tragic figures who are punished for their refusal to live up to the society’s
moral values, but are brought down, quite ironically, by their refusal to break
the strict values of the late 19th century provincial world in which
they live.
Insisting that she return home to help
her husband defeat his devils—a common dictum even today among hypocritical
spiritual advisors who order women to remain in the bondage of abusive
relationships. Given the intelligence and fortitude Mrs. Alving naturally
possesses, she returns, sending her young son, at a far too early age, to Paris
to study art, she taking over her disinterested husband’s financial affairs
which, upon his death, has made her a wealthy woman. Now, years later, she is
able to build an orphanage in his name, partly a tribute to her guilty
conscience and, at the same time, an attempt to close all debts, emotionally and
morally, she may feel she still owed her entrapped husband—particularly after
she has come to realize that as entangled as she was in a relationship of
deceit, so was Captain Alving ensnared by close-minded values of those around
him, including herself.
Into this hothouse of sorrow and guilt,
her son Oswald (Kenneth Branagh), after having some success in his artistic
career, returns to the isolated, always darkened but immaculately kept house,
presumably to help celebrate the new orphanage, but actually because he is
having difficulty in seeing which has sent him to a doctor who, as close as
Ibsen himself is able to speak the truth, is diagnosed as having a “softening
of the brain”—or, in modern parlance, the young man is suffering from inherited
syphilis and will soon become blind.
All of this is complicated by Manders’
visit to the Alving manse to deliver a speech for the opening of the orphanage,
a time when Mrs. Alving also choses to reveal to him that her husband was the
father of the beautiful young woman now working as her housemaid (Natasha
Richardson), not the often drunken and truly hypocritical Engstrand, who by cozying
up to the pastor has hoped to get his “daughter” to return to town with him,
where he plans to open a “home for wandering sailors” with perhaps a little
grant for his new enterprise as well.
As if things were not bad enough, Oswald
appears to have taken a romantic liking to Regina, who unknown to either of
them, are half sister and brother.
Now that I’ve refreshed your memories a
bit, I have two major questions to ask, both of which, have troubled me since I
fist read this play in Norway as a 16-year-old.
Although I here seemingly address these
questions to the reader, they might also be send to be indirectly asked of the
playwright himself.
Let me begin first with the problem of
Engstrand (Freddie Jones), who is also the first character of this dark drama to
express his chicanery. The savvy Regina immediately sees through his proposals
to create a home for sailors, particularly when he insists that she come “home”
to help him run it. The “home” clearly is to be a whorehouse, and the feisty
woman whom Mrs. Alving has helped to educate wants nothing at all to do with
it. Besides, it is clear that she has her eyes on the young son of the Alving
family, who has previously promised to take her back with him to Paris. In
secret she has even learned French. Indeed, Regina is quite openly embarrassed
by her “father,” and several times insists he leave her and the house
immediately.
Engstrand, while later pretending a
newfound religiosity, invites Manders to lead the nightly prayers, a ceremony
he claims he has instigated, for the betterment of his fellow carpenters.
Even a 16-year-old boy could see through
his plot. As the candles are lit for the prayers, flames are ignited by the
fresh sawdust of the construction, and the would-be orphanage quickly burns to
the ground. Engstrand, certainly the firebug behind the orphanage’s
destruction, can now freely, if somewhat subtly, bribe Manders into making sure
that he receives some of Mrs. Alving’s remaining funds for his sailor’s home
project.
Given Regina’s immediate recognition of
her father’s intentions and Mrs. Alving’s knowledge that he is only the titular
father of her husband’s child, how can Manders or anyone else—including Regina,
when she finally learns of her true parentage, determines to become a
prostitute in the tradition of her mother by returning to town with
Engstrand—want anything to do with this scoundrel? Why has Mrs. Alving, knowing
what she does, even hire him, evidently paying him well, to work on
construction of the orphanage?
And, of course, Engstrand’s multiple
deceptions—at one point even convincing Manders that in marrying Johanna, while
ignoring the money she had been bequeathed by Mrs. Alving, married her simply
out of love and caring for a girl in her predicament.
Hardly does Manders enter the Alving
house, when he appears scandalized that Mrs. Alving is reading contemporary
fiction, seriously warning her against their effects, although he has
admittedly read none of them.
A short while later he convinces the benefactress
that if she were to buy insurance to cover the new orphanage she (and more
particularly he) might be subject to local talk about the necessity to insure
something that stood for a godly belief in the betterment of the society around
them, both town and country.
Later, he is outraged by the fact that
Oswald has not only regularly dined with his artist friends, many of whom are
unmarried and fathers of children, but that Oswald speaks out so strongly for the natural
morality of his friends as opposed to church teachings.
When we finally learn of his long-ago
advice to Mrs. Alving and his refusals to accept her desperate love for him, we
can only ask what on earth was behind Fru Alving’s attraction to this
hypocritically babbling idiot in the first place. Even she, when Mandeers
becomes convinced of Engstrand’s defense of his marrying the Alving’s
housemaid, calls him a “baby.”
Why she has even allowed him—given her own
self-revelations and her growing investigation of the narrow culture in which
she lives—into her house, let alone into her financial affairs with the orphanage
is almost inexplicable. Throughout much of Elija Moshinsky’s brilliant
production, Dench is forced to sit in silent observation of this fool who seems
more out of a comic opera or a play by Molière than the great Norwegian character
drawn from Ibsen’s prolific pen.
In the end, I feel the Manders figure is
almost a statement of Ibsen’s failure in this play. If the events of Ghosts with
its series of recurring patterns that apparently cannot be contained by its
characters suggests a truly contemporary tragedy, its stock figures such as
Engstrand and Manders to not feel appropriate to a work that so dutifully
explores the intelligent and inquisitive performances of actors such as Dench,
Branagh, and Richardson.
My only justification for Ibsen’s
introduction of such fools is that, despite even the revelations of Mrs. Alving
and the hard-hearted realism of Regina—we eventually learn that Oswald wanted
her to remain close to him so that, when the time came when he would lose his
sight, predicting that she would have grown tired of having to deal with such
an invalid, Regina might willingly and mercifully have injected him with the
morphine he brought back to Norway with him—it becomes apparent that the two
would-be seers, each in their own way, are also quite blind.
It is only Oswald, unable now to see even
the sun along the horizon of daybreak, who can truly see that for all their
failures he now must die. His cry of “the sun, the sun” might almost be read as
emanating from a kind of new Christ, crying out “Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they did.”
The even the indecisive Mrs. Alving, syringe
in hand, must now, like a kind of errant Mary, kill her immaculately-birthed*
child.
*I
use this phrase because in Ibsen’s play, Mrs. Alving, who would have certainly
passed on her son’s syphilis, seems to be free of all its symptoms.
Los
Angeles, July 13, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2020).
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