some questions to ibsen about his ghosts
by Douglas Messerli
Henrik Ibsen (writer), Elijah Moshinsky (director) Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]
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.
In
particular, the seemingly saintly Mrs. Alving (quite brilliantly acted in this
BBC production by Judi Dench), after long enduring her husband’s
“degeneration”—which consists, evidently, of wine and women, including bedding
the house maid Johanna—she rushes into the arms of her local pastor, Manders
(Michael Gambon), for advice and, so it seems from her later confidences,
perhaps even for love.
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—she has been forced as a
young inexperience woman to fend for herself. 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
chooses to reveal to him that her husband was the father of the beautiful young
woman now working as her housemaid Regina (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 first read this play in Norway
as a 16-year-old.
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, Mr. Ibsen, has Mrs. Alving, knowing what she does, even hired
him, evidently paying him well, to work on the construction of the orphanage?
And, of course, you carefully reveal Engstrand’s multiple deceptions—at
one point even convincing Manders that in taking in Johanna, while ignoring the
money she had been bequeathed by Mrs. Alving, he 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, Mr. Ibsen, what
on earth was behind Fru Alving’s attraction to this hypocritically babbling
idiot in the first place? Even she, when Manders becomes convinced of
Engstrand’s defense of his marrying the Alving’s housemaid, calls him a “baby.”
Dear Mr. Ibsen, why has she even allowed him—given her own
self-revelations and her growing investigation of the narrow culture in which
she lives—into her house? Letting him run her financial affairs with the orphanage
is almost inexplicable. Throughout much of Elijah 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 one the great Norwegian
characters of the past drawn from your prolific pen.
Beyond 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—my only possible justification Engstrand
and Manders inclusion in Mrs. Alving’s and Regina’s hearts 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 perceive 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
only choice for the indecisive Mrs. Alving, syringe in hand, is to become a
kind of errant Mary, helping to 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).
