The most famous sound in theatrical history is a door shutting as the character Nora walks out on her oppressive family at the end of A Doll's House.
If that moment chimed with the women and men outside the theatre at the time struggling for a women’s right to vote, and gender equality more generally, it caused outrage among the established order of institutions from which arose many a demand that Ibsen change the ending and have Nora return to the bosom of the family.
A couple of years later, Ibsen responded with Ghosts, peering behind the curtain of what that demand might mean in the ruthlessly hierarchical discriminatory society that promotes the illusion of harmony where none exists.
Its central character, Helene Alving (Hattie Morahan), had been married barely a year when she left her dissolute husband and found brief refuge with Manders, a man she had loved and forsaken due to family pressure to marry Alving. Persuaded to return to her husband, she endured years of secret suffering, sending her son Osvald away to avoid his father’s terrible influence.
The play opens with Helene spending all the money she calculates Alving possessed when they married to build an orphanage to commemorate his death. Although this is partly to dispel potential rumours about his dissolute life, it is also about removing him completely from her life.
Father Manders (Paul Hilton), at that point a key figure in the community, arrives to complete the financial details and attend the ceremony to open the orphanage. It’s the first time he has visited Helene's home since she left her husband.
The servant Regina Engstrand (Sarah Slimani) informs him that the son is also back home for the event and takes the opportunity to ask him if he knows of any opportunities for her elsewhere. The pastor suggests she help her father (Greg Hicks), who has supervised much of the building work and has plans to open a rest home for sailors. However, she regards him as a drunken waster.
In the process of meeting each other for the ceremony, the reality of Alving’s tragic life is discussed, the repression of the family is exposed and secrets about adultery, non-sexual child abuse, incest and syphilis are revealed.
A sudden shock event prompts Helene to exclaim, “ghosts”. Later, she explains that the ghosts are “dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines.”
The words are part of her recognition of the destructiveness of following established institutional inequalities, a journey she has taken the hard way by enduring long years of repression.
The Globe production of the play, adapted and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, keeps mostly to the text but tends to eclipse the politics for unnecessary emphatic visual and audio gestures to drive home a particular meaning of implied elements of the plot.
Manders is a dishonest hypocrite who is possibly still romantically drawn to Helene, who might still have a lingering affection for him. In case you miss these possibilities, the director has them passionately embracing each other as Manders says, “I have never thought of you as anything other than another man’s wife.” That moment gets a laugh.
There are other such scenes. I have never seen Ghosts get so many laughs as this production. The scene which causes the fearful Helene to utter the word "ghosts" is usually unsettling. This production accompanies it with a loud gong, which instead gets a laugh.
To emphasise differences between characters, Manders appears in a neat suit and tie, while the bohemian Osvald turns up in his underwear and cardigan before spending much of the time lying face down in the centre of the very fluffy, burgundy fur-covered stage that is backed by a wall of mirrors.
Since nothing is done in half measure, we can’t miss characters being flirtations or getting emotional. When one character is annoyed, they pour a bottle of wine over another character. This production even resolves the dilemma of certain characters that emerges at the end of the play.
Ibsen always refused to say what the outcome of that dilemma would be. However, Joe Hill-Gibbins has an answer, so there’s no need for audience members to later debate that bit.
The UK continues to treat women worse than men, promoting narrow gender stereotypes, often causing women to become the horrific victims of social frustration at the lack of control any of us have in the workplace, the family, the school or the environment.
In the year ending in March 2022, the police recorded 1,500,369 domestic abuse-related incidents and crimes in England and Wales. And still, the ghosts of dead ideas dominate our lives.