GHOSTS BOHEMIAN THEATRE ENSEMBLE
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And yet there’s still a bit of creakiness in the play’s bones—which may account for why the tale of long-suffering Helene Alving and her tormented son, Oswald, gets fewer revivals than a feminist evergreen like A Doll’s House. Though London critic Clement Scott famously decried Ghosts in 1891 as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly,” there’s not that much about it that’s gasp-worthy anymore. Neither Oswald’s congenital syphilis—a grim inheritance from his dead, libertine father, Captain Alving—nor the fact that the family maid, Regina, is his half-sister by way of rape is such a shocker in the age of August: Osage County. At this point the most resonant element in Ibsen’s smorgasbord of scandals is Oswald’s desire to be euthanized. Given the uproar over Dr. Jack Kevorkian—revived this spring by Barry Levinson’s HBO docudrama, You Don’t Know Jack—it seems the only thing left with the potential to push our buttons is assisted suicide.
Helene Alving is often held up as the image of what Nora Helmer of A Doll’s House might’ve become if she hadn’t walked out on husband Torvald and slammed the door behind her. Helene stayed with the Captain out of fear of flouting convention, and now that he’s dead she’s built an orphanage, of all things, as a sop to his public image. As psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome expresses it in her 1892 book, Ibsen’s Heroines, Helene “knows that she must remain until the last in the depths and under the shadows, never to scale those sunny heights.” Her equivocal victory over the harsh constraints of the world, Andreas-Salome writes, is that “she will be granted a flash of clarity—and with it, her release.”
