Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
Director Stephen Unwin’s final production at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey was Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen. Ghosts was written in Danish in 1881, the Danish title Gengangere translates as ‘revenants: the ones who return.’
Ibsen’s play concerns the unearthing of family secrets, confronting the unhappy spectres of the past which Ibsen described as ‘a family story as sad and grey as this rainy day.’ Mrs Alving (Kelly Hunter) says, ‘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 of course Marx identified that ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a alp on the brains of the living.’
Ibsen’s theme is ‘how to be true to yourself’, personal authenticity, which is constrained by ‘the meanness and deliberate hypocrisy of our public life and society.’ Ghosts is an attack on the hypocrisy in the moyenne (middle) bourgeoisie. Mrs Alving is reading books but her spiritual and business adviser, the Lutheran Pastor Manders is not impressed with ‘these books, that sort of thing.’ We can only guess that they could be works by Marx, Darwin or Nietzsche. Manders represents Protestant, capitalist ethics, the hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, conventional values, conservative attitudes of petty bourgeois gentility. Manders proclaims ‘to pursue happiness in this world is to be governed by the spirit of rebellion. What right do we have to happiness? No, we must do our duty.’ It is not surprising that Nietzsche revolted against this upbringing by his Lutheran Pastor father.
Mrs Alving’s artist son Oswald (Mark Quarterley) returns from the bohemian life in Paris, defends free love, the ‘joy of life’ as opposed to the ‘vale of tears’ of Christian ideology. He represents the ‘élan vital’, the ‘life force’ of Bergson’s philosophy.
Ibsen was concerned how ‘women of the modern age were mistreated as daughters, as sisters, as wives’, and Marx felt that with man and woman ‘it is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind.’
Steve Clayton
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