by Gail M. Burns
Anders Cato’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts is breathtaking. By that I mean that it literally takes your breath away. You forget to breathe. It is that good.
And what a cast! David Adkins (Pastor Manders), Mia Dillon (Helene Alving), Jonathan Epstein (Engstrand), Tara Franklin (Regine Engstrand), and Randy Harrison (Osvald Alving) – all consummate performers and handsome people. They glide about Lee Savage’s set, which manages, with the help of Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, to be both stark and somber all at the same time – white like glaciers, slate gray like the sky when it rains at dusk – in Olivera Gajic’s subdued, monochromatic costumes that are streamlined yet true to the Edwardian period of the play. We have all seen that done before – a black and white set with a sudden splash of color – but here the one color, a deep burgundy red, is itself a muted statement of stifled horror.
As I took my seat I heard someone behind me say the word “Syphilis.” It was a word I had been saying all day. “What’s the play about?” “Syphilis.” But the speaker’s companion behind me quickly said, “No its not about that. The word is never spoken.” And they were right on both counts.
Ghosts is not about syphilis, but the disease plays an important role and its name is never spoken. In Ibsen’s day syphilis was euphemistically called The French Disease when it was spoken of at all, and of course it couldn’t be spoken of on stage. In this day and age, decades after the discovery of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, we are unfamiliar with its horrors. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease which, in its advanced stages, causes blindness and dementia. It is possible for a woman become infected with syphilis by her partner and to carry the disease asymptomatically and pass it on to her offspring. This is what has happened to Helene Alving. Her philandering husband has infected her and their son, Osvald, was born syphilitic. He did not contract the disease living a degenerate artist’s life in Paris, as one might assume without clarification. Very literally, the sins of the father have been visited upon the son, and that, not the disease itself, is what Ghosts is all about.
Did you ever have one of those days? Well whatever befell you doesn’t begin to compare to the horrors Helene Alving experiences in the day recounted in Ghosts. Dark secrets are revealed, an orphanage that she has built in her late husband’s memory burns down, and her son, who is dying of syphilis, appears to be at the point of marrying the woman he doesn’t know is his half-sister. When his proposal is rejected, he asks his mother to help him commit suicide. And this all happens because she married, and was convinced to stay married to, an adulterous womanizer.
I read that Ibsen objected to the word ghosts as the English title of this play. The word he used – Gengangere – can most aptly be described by asking you to think of Norm on the TV show Cheers. Every day they opened the bar and Norm walked in. Norm was always there, on the same stool. Norm was not a ghost, he was an eternal presence, the uninvited guest who never goes home. Like it or not, if you go to Cheers, Norm will be there. That’s what Gengangere means. Helene Alving is not haunted by the past, it is always with her, it is her present and her future.
Ibsen intended Ghosts to be about the ill effects of the proper bourgeois Victorian society of the upper-middle and upper classes. Keeping everything that was improper secret and repressed could, and did, result in terrible consequences. That Ghosts was considered scandalous and repugnant when it was originally published in 1881, is no surprise. The Emperor hates it when you tell him he’s naked.
The script is billed as “a brand new translation” in the press release and as an “original adaptation” in the program. Those two words have very different meanings and I confess I am perplexed. Ibsen wrote the play in Norwegian* and it has been translated into English various times in the past century, first by William Archer, and later by Robert Farquharson Sharp. The latter seems to be the translations in the textbooks and play collections I have from the late 20th century. If this is a new translation, bravo. But calling it an adaptation raises visions of Cato and his collaborator, dramaturg James Leverett, taking their favorite English versions and playing around with them, a practice of which I am deeply suspicious. I am suspicious enough of plays in translation to start with. In his program notes Leverett states “some of [this adaptation] is as close to the original as English can come” which encourages me to believe that they did go back to Ibsen’s original which one or both of them were able to read and translate.
While there are still three distinct sections to the play, this version plays in two acts, not the three Ibsen wrote (the break between the original Acts II and III is the fire) and the whole show comes in at just under two and a half hours, so there has been considerable tightening of the dialogue.
I found Leverett’s program notes, and the three quotations from Ibsen which he and Cato chose to include in the program, very interesting and helpful, and so I have scanned them and make them available to you HERE.
The cast is so strong that there is no need to criticize. Not only do they all offer superb performances, but they work seamlessly together as an ensemble. That many of them have worked before at and have worked with Cato is an asset. They are comfortable with the style of performance he demands. I mentioned earlier what a handsome cast this is – “eye candy” would not be an inappropriate term to use here. I can’t think of when I have felt so privileged to sit in a theatre and watch artists at work.
I loved Savage’s set from the moment I walked in and saw in all its stark, somber gray glory. Its Norway, the leading man has syphilis, the set is all in gray, and then it starts to rain…on stage…oh lord how gloriously depressing and Ibsenesque. Even Kate Maguire was wearing a somber gray dress for her curtain speech. Gloom and foreboding. Then the stage lights came up and the set was revealed as quite white. A slanting wall of windows stage right dripped and drizzled with water while reflecting the occasional face or body in, dare I say it, a ghostly echo of the original. Ibsen dictates that we see the steep cliffs of a fjords outside, but here we see nothing but more white and more rain. Micoleau’s bright white lighting projected shadows that loomed over the actors in fascinating ways, I was especially struck when Adkins, standing about as far away as he could get from Dillon, cast a shadow that hovered over her and almost consumed her in their early scene together where Manders’ style clearly holds the upper hand.
But this is all what I saw from the far side of the aisle, house left, in the orchestra. I think that the people seated house right saw a very different set and therefore a very different show, and that bothers me. An asymmetrical set is fine, but not if it means different sections of the audience get different value for their money. If you decide to go, be SURE your seats are house left. That means to the left of center as you stand at the back of the house and face the stage.
Speaking of ghosts, there is an ensemble of six young actors named and pictured in the program who never appeared. I can’t think where they would have appeared, unless as on-lookers at the fire. Unlike Norm’s, their stools were left empty for the duration.
I really found Ghosts to be hold-your-breath, edge-of-the-seat exciting from beginning to end. It is an “unpleasant” play, as George Bernard Shaw would say, in that it is about tough subjects, but it is an excellent piece of theatre. This is not a show for the whole family, but if you love great theatre, this is it.
Ghosts runs through August 29 on the Main Stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, nestled between Routes 7 and 102 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The show runs two hours and twenty minutes with one intermission and is not suitable for children under 16.
Ghosts is performed Monday, Tuesday, and Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm, Wednesdays at 7 pm, with matinees on Thursdays and Saturdays at 2 pm. Tickets range from $15 to $68. For more information call the box office at 413-298-5576.
*I did find a source that claimed he wrote it in Danish, which seems an odd thing for a Norwegian citizen living in Norway and working at a Norwegian theatre to do, but you can look at page views of the original here and if you can tell Danish from Norwegian, you can be the judge.
Copyright Gail M. Burns 2009