Say what you will about critics. None of us can hold a candle to the Daily Telegraph’s Clement Scott in 1891, reviewing the London premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts:
This disgusting representation … infecting the modern theatre with poison … An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open … Gross, almost putrid indecorum … Literary carrion … Crapulous stuff … Novel and perilous nuisance.
When the play was published in Copenhagen nine years earlier, it caused such outrage that almost every one of the 10,000 copies sat moldering in a warehouse. (If he hadn’t been suffering from the financial loss, Ibsen might have enjoyed the irony: In the play itself, one character raises her eyebrow at another for condemning books he’s never read.) The story goes that even the king of Norway and Sweden, at a dinner given in Ibsen’s honor, told his guest, “You shouldn’t have written Ghosts, Ibsen. That’s not a good play” — at which Ibsen, after a long, dreadful pause, burst out, “Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!”
This kind of wild history can present new productions with baggage to handle — not because we’re still scandalized by public discussions of venereal disease, incest, assisted suicide, and blatant moral hypocrisy, but because… How do you live up to all that? How can Ghosts continue, if not to send us into spasms of offense, then still to electrify and unnerve, to shock not our delicate constitutions but our consciences, which, after all, was its intention all along?
Jack O’Brien’s new attempt on Ibsen’s reviled and—eventually—revered truth-bomb doesn’t so much answer that question as sub it out for another less interesting one: What happens if you put a bunch of famous people in the show and, for the majority of its 110 minutes, play it pretty straight? In a streamlined, surprisingly low-key new translation by the Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, this Ghosts doesn’t exactly founder, but it doesn’t haunt or horrify either. It feels stuck between times and impulses: 1880s Norway or now? Stylized or not? Unashamedly tragic or vaguely ironic? There’s a turned-up-to-eleven quality in Ibsen’s plot twists and moral confrontations that can be tricky to embrace without incurring a certain amount of contemporary giggling — nervous, detached, or otherwise. But the man also has his own wicked sense of humor. A director of his plays these days is scoring the audience as much as the onstage action: When do you want them to laugh? When do you need them rapt?
O’Brien hasn’t exerted that kind of tonal control, and so instead of transporting us between compelling extremes, the show, once it gets going, tends to skate within a more comfortable middle area. His major directorial gesture is a framing device that feels, if anything, birthed less from the depths of the play than from outside anxiety surrounding the production: On John Lee Beatty’s simple wooden thrust floor—backed by a wall of windows and adorned with a single stately wooden table and various bits of upholstered furniture—the actors enter with staggered casualness while the house lights are still up. Though the audience dutifully quiets down, sound designers Mark Bennett and Scott Lehrer keep a muffled hum of voices thickening the atmosphere, as if there’s another invisible crowd in the room with us, still chatting, waiting for the show to begin. In outfits that attempt to straddle the gap between modern street clothes and softly period characters (the costumes are by Jess Goldstein), the ensemble navigate the space as if they’ve just arrived for rehearsal. They carry scripts bound in green cardstock. Playing the drunken carpenter Jacob Engstrand, Hamish Linklater finds a chunk of two-by-four and a roll of gaffer’s tape in a drawer. Watched by Ella Beatty, playing his daughter Regina—a servant in the upper-class Alving household on an island off the coast of Norway—he tapes the block to the bottom of one foot. Engstrand, well-meaning, dissipated, and unlucky, has an old leg wound that he’s fond of reminding people he sustained “standing up for a woman’s honor.” When Linklater and Beatty begin to talk, they do so at first in flat, perfunctory tones — reading from their scripts, referring to rain that isn’t there. They stop, go back to the top, and do it again. O’Brien has them repeat the start of the play several times, layering in more realism (i.e., more theater) with each go. Soon enough, the scripts are gone, father and daughter are squabbling intimately with each other, and a steady gray rain is drizzling down the upstage windows.
It’s — interesting. Especially watching Linklater—who’s giving by far the most compelling performance in the production—coming to gruff, aggrieved life by degrees. But I’m still not certain I know what it all has to do with Ghosts. What is it about the heart of this play—which wrestles with the cancerous social sanctimony that, in masking abuse and depravity, winds up passing its infections on generation by generation—that necessitates an onstage transition from rehearsal nonchalance to fully realized performance? One could go the grad-school route and set about digging for intellectual justification: Something-something performance versus authenticity, something, truth and lies… But the impression in the room is more one of conceptual insecurity, of attaching something—anything—to the front of an old play because you don’t quite trust just getting into the play itself. The irony is that once things get rolling, questions of theatricality, meta or otherwise, pretty much evaporate. O’Brien still seems pressured to add a gesture here and there — every so often, Japhy Weideman’s lights go lurid while something ominous booms in the sound design, but these moments feel flimsy, slapdash injections of melodrama into what’s otherwise a play-shaped play.
Thanks to Ibsen, that’s still an enthralling shape. In a grand old house on that Norwegian island, five lives come to a fiery point of crisis: Helena Alving (Lily Rabe) is preparing to open an orphanage dedicated to her late husband, remembered by all as a pillar of the community. At the same time, she’s welcoming home her son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), who’s been living abroad since childhood and who—much to the chagrin of the family’s spiritual counselor, Pastor Manders (Billy Crudup)—has been cultivating a bohemian existence in Paris. Oswald has brought home a shattering secret, but it’s not stopping him from shooting glances at Regina, who’s grappling with her own social aspirations and with pressure from her mess of a father to leave her rich mistress and come home. Ibsen’s Danish title for the play was Gengangere — literally “the ones who return” or, more forebodingly, “the revenants.” There’s something ambiguous and fleshy in the word that “ghosts” lacks — it could apply to both Oswald and his dead father, who are soon enough rolled into one as the son reveals his awful news: He’s dying of syphilis, and according to the doctor who diagnosed him, he’s been “worm-eaten” since birth. Helena spirited Oswald away in time for him to retain a shining image of his father, but only she knows the truth: Captain Alving was “depraved,” “obscene and lascivious,” and the thing consuming her son’s brain from the inside out is congenital — his poison inheritance.
Not that anyone says the word “syphilis” in Ghosts — in Ibsen’s version or, notably, in O’Rowe’s. Yes, on the one hand, if you know Ghosts, you know it’s the infamous syphilis play, but I found myself wondering about audience members who might not arrive with that familiarity. “Worm-eaten” and the equivalent word Oswald uses, the French vermoulu, are creepy and poetic, but it’s hard to deploy them in this day and age to generate an immediate sense of devastating stakes. It perhaps doesn’t help that Hawke (one of the show’s several kids of famous folks; his sister will be starring in Eurydice at Signature later this spring) has a natural breeziness about him. He’s lanky and golden and remarkably chill for someone whose brain is supposed to be disintegrating. His interpretation feels so consistently light that it can be difficult to keep a grip on the play’s tragic core, or on its moral one. “I hate the way people judge our way of life!” he bursts out at one point, as Pastor Manders tries to paint his Parisian artist friends as enemies of family values. “How, because of a moral deficiency in themselves, they try to turn our freedom into something debased, something shameful.” Say it louder, Oswald! That’s a speech that hasn’t aged a minute, but Hawke isn’t undergirding it with full Ibsenian backbone. We hear the words, but we don’t feel the punch.
Meanwhile, by Oswald’s side at the center of the plot, Rabe’s Helena and Crudup’s Manders feel like they haven’t quite worked out their dance. Despite all the pastor’s conventionality and sanctimony, there are flames between them, but those flickers run fairly cool until a breaking point in which Manders at last makes explicit reference to them. Crudup is a wonderful actor, and Manders is also a tough part — one of Ibsen’s spineless and yet somehow not soulless creatures. He’s ingratiating, self-preserving, close-minded, and almost absurdly naïve, but he’s also got genuine wells of kindness and compassion, a wish to be better without the courage for it, a belief in love without the muscle. I have a feeling Crudup’s performance might both expand and focus over the course of the run, finding more rooms in the complicated house of the role. Whether that same deepening and sharpening is likely in O’Brien’s production overall is another question. For now, this Ghosts doesn’t actively shake us so much as remind us that, in its wily old bones, that capacity to rattle still remains.
Ghosts is at the Mitzi E. Newhouse at Lincoln Center Theater through April 26.