Ghosts #4

GHOSTS by Henrik Ibsen: Director’s Notes

The Playwright:  Ibsen was a rotter!  Yes, yes, I am sure a bus-load of psychologists, social workers and outreach counsellors could come up with a myriad of mitigations as to why he was such an outstanding rat-bag of a man but the fact remains that is what he was.  This has no bearing on his plays many of which are superb and this play, in particular, is supreme. 

His extreme misanthropy was a living expression of Nietzschean philosophy which extols the ‘virtue’ of satisfying the ‘Self’.  I place inverted commas round the word ‘virtue’ because, of course, Nietzsche denied that vice and virtue actually existed except as constructs from the minds of those who seek to control us.  Thus, morality must be swept away in the imperative desire to achieve fulfilment of the ‘Self’ by means of the ‘Will’.  Adolph Hitler swallowed Nietzschean philosophy whole, thus proving that it takes one mad German to appreciate another!

The Play:  Ibsen, in his desire to shake to destruction The Pillars of the Community (another of his plays), gradually moved the motifs of his plays nearer and nearer to the edge of acceptability.  In The Doll’s House, which preceded this play, he attacked the institution of marriage but with Ghosts he touched on subjects that, even by today’s debauched ‘standards’, still have the power to shock.  Through gritted teeth I am forced to admit that his vile subversion is carried out with consummate theatrical skill and artistry.  That is why I would suggest that Ghosts is the most important play written since Shakespeare.  It sums up within itself, all the fissures, the uncertainties, the doubts and the weaknesses that festered just beneath the surface of Victorian certitudes.  Along with Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, a detail of which I have used as our logo, Ghosts was the epitome of the ‘shock of the new’, a shock that was to change the face of western society – for good or ill but for ever!                                                                                   “The minority is always right” Ibsen: An Enemy of the People

‘Abolish the concept of the state, establish the principle of free will’ Ibsen: as recorded by his friend Brandes

What the critics said at the time…

“An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open … Candid foulness … offensive cynicism … Ibsen’s melancholy and malodorous world …Absolutely loathsome and fetid … Gross, almost putrid indecorum” Daily Telegraph

“Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous” Daily Chronicle

“Noisome corruption” The Stage

“A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman”  Lloyds

“Ghosts is the sort of play that requires ammonia.  The smell of it leaves onions far astern.” The Tribune

“The shriek of execration with which this performance was received by the newspapers of the day has scarcely met its counterpart in the history of criticism.”  The Pall Mall Gazette

To which Ibsen replied …

“I of course foresaw that my new play would call forth a howl from the camp of the stagnationists; and for this I care no more than for the barking of a pack of chained dogs.  But the pusillanimity which I have observed among so-called Liberals has given me cause for reflection.”

One critic, at least, defended the play …

“Do these people really find nothing in Ghosts but a painful study of disease?  Have they no eyes for what stares them in the face: the plain simple fact that Ghosts is a great spiritual drama?  A drama of revolt – the revolt of ‘the joy of life’ against the gloom of the hide-bound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man  against the law-made, law-bound puppet, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social prejudice.” A. B. Walkley, The Star

And so did another, I think …

After the first act the applause was immense.  After the second, a third of the applauders were startled into silence.  After the third, four fifths were awe-struck.” George Bernard Shaw

For a modern summary …

“He[Ibsen] was as rabidly hostile to conventional family life as Marx or Engels, but he was a much more effective and powerful critic, because his criticism did not remain on the level of philosophical abstraction. On the contrary, he laid bare the factions and revolutions of family life, its lies and miseries, in compelling and believable dramas; and while it has always been open to the reader or viewer to ascribe the moral pathology exhibited in these plays to the particular characters or neuroses of their dramatis personae alone, clearly this was not Ibsen’s intention. He was not a forerunner of Jerry Springer; his aim was not titillation or a mere display of the grotesque. He intends us to regard the morbidity his plays anatomize as typical and quintessential (to use Shaw’s word), the inevitable consequence of certain social conventions and institutions. […]

The modernity of Ibsen’s thought hardly needs further emphasis. The elevation of emotion over principle, of inclination over duty, of rights over responsibilities, of ego over the claims of others; the impatience with boundaries and the promotion of the self as the measure of all things: what could be more modern or gratifying to our current sensibility.”     Theodore Dalrymple: Ibsen and His Discontents

Comments

[Larry Teabag]

I've spotted a mistake (deliberate I'm sure)...

[David Duff]

Only one? I must be improving. Go on then, do tell ...

[Larry Teabag]

Adolph Hitler wasn't a mad German.

Adolf Hitler, however, was a mad Austrian.

[David Duff]

Bugger! I've just lost a bet with myself. It was a dead cert in my mind that it would be 'NIB' who picked that one up. Anyway, I forgive myself (you see how generous I am) on the grounds of literary expression in what is known as the 'duff-florid-style', and ethnic confusion - on the part of the German-Austrians, of course, most of whom would have difficulty detecting any difference between an Austrian or a Bavarian - so what chance has a simple-minded Brit?

[Larry Teabag]

Sorry David, but if you're going to refer to him by a name which isn't exactly the one bestowed upon him by his parents at birth, then you must put quote marks around it thus: 'Adolph' Hitler.

Otherwise it just looks silly.

[David Duff]

Well done, 'Larry', that made me laugh.

1 - 0 to you, I think!