Cutting away the cargo

Royal and Derngate Ghosts photographs by Sheila Burnett

At war with the trolls

On the same weekend I breathed the same air as Sir Ian McKellen (see previousblog), I got to see one of the masterpieces of World Theatre: Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen. The marvellous Penny Downie played Mrs Alving in this production by Lucy Bailey with James Wilby as angry hypocrite Pastor Manders, Pierro Niel-Mee as doomed idealistic Oswald, Declan Conlon as old reprobate Engstrand and Eleanor McLoughlin as a spirited no-nonsense Regina. The production was beautifully designed by Mike Britton with the weather (the mist… the rain…), the light (the sun… give me the sun…) and the elements, particularly fire (quite a bonfire…) filling the atmosphere of the building with tightly wound dread. Ibsen wrote of this play that everyone “shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. To live is to be at war with trolls in heart and soul.”

Collour picture of Lesley Manville and Jack Lowden in Richard Eyre's production available @ Digital Theatre

Sins of the fathers

In my view, Ibsen runs a close second to Shakespeare in creating an everlasting impact on drama and theatre and Ghosts contains many of the motifs that permeate his work:

• the deadening weight of past conventions and conservative attitudes
• the exposure of the hypocrisy of authoritarian figures and establishments
• the symbolism of primal forces like light, education, fire and architecture
• the contamination of the self, the family, the society, the nation
• the human need for blistering honesty

We all sail with a corpse in the cargo, believed Ibsen, and to be truly free we need to cut away the cargo and free ourselves from the restrictions placed on us by previous generations. Ghosts is like a coiled spring that gnaws at your conscience until the final moments when you are faced with a pietà of grief and glory.