Ghosts
By Henrik Ibsen
3.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Ibsen's classic tragic masterpiece, in a new version by Richard Eyre.
Helene Alving has spent her life suspended in an emotional void after the death of her cruel but outwardly charming husband. She is determined to escape the ghosts of her past by telling her son, Oswald, the truth about his father.
But on his return from his life as a painter in France, Oswald reveals how he has already inherited the legacy of Alving's dissolute life.
Richard Eyre's scintillating new version of perhaps Ibsen's greatest play premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in October 2013.
'raw and unsparing, but also devastatingly true to the spirit of the original... theatre seldom, if ever, comes greater than this' Sunday Telegraph
'both humorous and deeply affecting... the most lucid and affecting version of the play I have ever seen' Time Out
'Richard Eyre's new stripped-down 90-minute version has glories too many to list' The Times
Henrik Ibsen
Born in 1828, Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and poet, often associated with the early Modernist movement in theatre. Determined to become a playwright from a young age, Ibsen began writing while working as an apprentice pharmacist to help support his family. Though his early plays were largely unsuccessful, Ibsen was able to take employment at a theatre where he worked as a writer, director, and producer. Ibsen’s first success came with Brand and Peter Gynt, and with later plays like A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and The Master Builder he became one of the most performed playwrights in the world, second only to William Shakespeare. Ibsen died in his home in Norway in 1906 at the age of 78.
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Reviews for Ghosts
8 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ibsen's plays really take you to the end of 19th century - and make youfeel the anxiety caused by social pressures and hypocrisy and seek the power to break free from the rules and conventions and reach for something real.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5a play about Mrs. Alving a widow,who was accused by Pastor Manders,of failing in providing enough moral guidance to her son Oswald....
MANDERS. Just as you once disowned a wife's duty, so you have since
disowned a mother's.
MRS. ALVING. Ah--!
MANDERS. You have been all your life under the dominion of a
pestilent spirit of self-will. The whole bias of your mind has been
towards insubordination and lawlessness. You have never known how to
endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you
have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you were
free to throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any
longer, and you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a
mother, and you sent your child forth among strangers.
MRS. ALVING. Yes, that is true. I did so.
MANDERS. And thus you have become a stranger to him.
MRS. ALVING. No! no! I am not.
after this conversation,Mrs. Alving was forced to tell the truth that she had kept hidden.that Captain Alving was an awful man who was unfaithful throughout his life....
there are many symbols in this play....
the ghosts which are MRS. ALVING thoughts....lies about the past and her fear to say the truth,that should be told....
Oswald last wish before dying is to see the sun light ,he kept crying out for the sun. which symbolize for the joy of life which he always seeks....
The fire that destroys the orphanage which she was naming after her husband name....that destroyed the whole building,and eliminated all the deception.....
MANDERS. And it is to this man that you raise a memorial?
MRS. ALVING. There you see the power of an evil conscience.
MANDERS. Evil--? What do you mean?
MRS. ALVING. It always seemed to me impossible but that the truth
must come out and be believed. So the Orphanage was to deaden all
rumours and set every doubt at rest. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Excellently written, dark, controversial at time and now drama about all kinds of unpleasantries that affect peoples lives from 'dissipated lives' to euthanasia and using morphine to commit suicide cos of VD. I will explore Ibsens Ouvre.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Dilemma’s: -erfelijkheid (Oswald)-hypocrisie en burgerlijke moraal:Manders-vrouwenplicht: mrs Alving-respect voor ouders: Regina (weer erg engelachtig)-euthanasie: Oswaldniet helemaal geslaagd!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A powerful, controversial play (like most of his), he conveys a less than sterling relationship between mother and son that disintegrates when the truth comes out and the son's mind deteriorates. The truth will always out.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This adaptation grabs Ibsen by the shirt front and lunges him into the 21st century with vigorous dialogue in a modern idiom that fosters immediacy, as well as an identification with that combination of “dead ideas, dead customs, dead morals”—our inherited ghosts—that the Norwegian saw as the root cause of social pollution. “I had remembered it,” Eyre says in his introduction, “as a play about a physical disease and forgotten that the disease is both real and a metaphor for a rotting society.” He cites Emma Goldman, of all theater critics, who equated Ibsen’s dramaturgy with “the trumpets before the walls of Jericho. Into the remotest nooks and corners reaches his voice, with its thundering indictment of our moral cancers, our social poisons, our hideous crimes against unborn and born victims.” There’s no point in reviving Ibsen unless an effort is made to play those trumpets in a contemporary key, and I sense Eyre’s deliriously readable version lays the groundwork for just such a revival.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hey, Whoopi Goldberg isn't in this...I found the play interesting, but Oswald's hysterics were melodramatic and bordered on comical. For a better play about a dysfunctional family, read Tennessee Williams.