Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen
Big Ensemble
Lion Theatre.

Of all Ibsen’s plays, Ghosts is the most scarifying. Its themes are darkly deterministic, its social criticism relentless. Ibsen’s plays spoke not just for his own country but for all of Europe, haunted by the ghosts of dead ideas, old and obsolete beliefs. As his central character, Mrs Alving says – “They are not alive in us but they remain in us none the less, and we can never rid themselves of them.”

Big Ensemble director, Kim Hanna, is to be commended for restaging this classic but it is unclear how he wants to connect a work so strongly defined by the issues of its day, to a contemporary audience. With a text, by May Brit Akerhold and Louis Nowra, Hanna has relocated the play in time and place. Ghosts now takes place on Mrs Alving’s country property in Australia in 1953.

While the temptation to update the play is strong – especially with its analogies to AIDS this choice is a curious, seemingly arbitrary one. Certainly it means Engstrand can enter with a heavy strine accent, it might even allow a passing swipe at the anaesthetised fifties, but it raises more problems than it solves. For a start, one of the triumphs of World War II was the development of a wide range of sulpha drugs – just the ticket for . Oswald’s case of clap. In fact it would have made it Ghosts II – The Happy Ending.

The changed setting also plays havoc with the play’s careful images of light and shade. The way Oswald keeps complaining about the darkness and the endless rain, you’d swear he was in Norway.

Designers Kathryn Sproul and Lisa Philip Harbutt have not fully embraced these changes either. There is not a pair of moleskins or deco tea trolley in sight. Instead there is a large (guilt- edged?) picture frame, half covered in gauze for the ghostly bits. The actors step through this satiric proscenium to an Edwardian-ish setting of chairs on a carpet square. The point is confusing.

Ibsen’s picture frame was an unflattering mirror, familiar in all its bourgeois detail. It was inescapably the world of its audience who, understandably, loathed him for his candour. Here, there seems to be a statement about our proximity that is misleading. The oddly indeterminate, or at least highly selective, period detail means that these Ghosts end up being nowhere in particular – and certainly in dubious relation to our own situation.

Not only are the actors still trapped by the fourth wall, they are also betrayed by their decor. In their constricted and exposed acting space . the performances are at times jittery – but consolidate as the action progresses. As Pastor Manders, Patrick Frost is convincingly repressed but too mincy to explain Helen Alving’s attraction to him. Julie d’Lima’s Regine is lucid and well-judged but if the translators can have her saying – “Shit I’m not staying around here,” or words to that effect then they might have clarified the play by allowing Oswald to say – “Mum, I’ve got tertiary syphilis and its not my fault”. Ibsen didn’ t need to name the malady – like the symptoms of AIDS now, they were gravely familiar .

Graham Kelleher, as Oswald, gains considerable momentum by Act Three and his work, with Barbara West as Mrs Alving brings the final, difficult scenes into sharp focus. Barbara West’s account of Mrs Alving is both fragile and disturbing. At its best it is a performance that reminds us of the complexity of Ibsen’s character – sometimes described as theolder double of Nora from The Doll’s House. Rick Henshaw as the sly, manipulative Engstrand only partially succeeds, stuck as he is in local stereotype. It’s rather like he’s doing regional duty in a play where everyone else comes from RADA.

Big Ensemble has taken on a big task with Ghosts and their success in bringing the play to some dramatic intensity is almost in spite of their conceptual reading. They have neither trusted the play’s capacity to speak from the past nor have they found the ghosts in our own cupboard.

“Phantom Ibsen”, The Adelaide Review, No.92, September, 1991, p.37.