Ghosts Playbill

Ghosts Henrik ibsen

adapted by morris panych

artist note: “Two strains of sentiment inform Ibsen’s being. There is the need to escape the dark constraints in the environment in which he had been bred, and the complementary impulse to enter and embrace the bright realm of freedom.” – Harold Clurman I was in New York at the end of June. It had been a particularly dark year for me – death in the family, an illness of a loved one with daily trips to the hospital, the end of a long-term relationship and a hard winter of deep personal challenges on many fronts. The first few days I wandered the streets in a fog. Hours and hours of endless walking. It was as if I was walking off steam that had been accumulating, building up and stored for months. I didn’t eat, hardly slept, just walked.

Then slowly the weight lifted and a light lit up inside me. New hope, possibility of freedom, rediscovery of a life force…

“The only thing I care about liberty is the struggle for it. I care nothing for the possession of it.”

– ibsen …And then the anxiety came over me. I have to go home. Of course I feel new hope – I’m in a new place, living a pretend life. I have no responsibility here. No duty. No history. I can be what I want. How can I keep this light burning, this life force, this clarity of thought and intention and enter back into my old life?

In this way Ibsen in Ghosts throws us into a dark haunted house with five humans battling their demons, scratching and fighting in their own way for freedom and light. He gives us their struggles (some victory, some defeat) and in the end leaves us with a profoundly real and human proposal. After the doors have been burst open, the curtains pulled away so that the light can shine in – life must go on. The consequences of liberty and light can be just as challenging as the struggle for them. Hedda Gabler ends it, Nora walks away from it but Mrs. Alving must live with it. I think that is what makes this play so devastatingly vital.

Working on Ghosts with this incredible team of generous, rigorous and fiercely intelligent artists is a dream come true for me. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and hope that this story touches you.

Gregory Prest, Oswald Alving in Ghosts

illustration: chris silas neal

ghosts Henrik ibsen

1881 norway

adapted by morris panych

production

cast

Morris Panych Director

Diego Matamoros jacob Engstrand

Ken MacDonald Set Designer

Michelle Monteith Regine engstrand

Dana Osborne costume Designer

Nancy Palk Mrs. Alving

Alan Brodie lighting designer

Gregory Prest Oswald alving

Thomas Ryder Payne sound designer

Joseph Ziegler pastor Manders

Arwen MacDonell Production stage manager Sarah Miller assistant stage manager Nicole Myers* apprentice stage manager Kelly McEvenue alexander coach Jack Grinhaus Assistant Director

production sponsor

*Nicole Myers appears with special permission of the Canadian Actors’ Equity Association and her

services were made possible through Theatre Ontario’s Professional Training Program, funded by the Ontario Arts Council.

There will be one 20-minute intermission. Approximate running time 2 hours and 15 minutes.

background notes Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Today Henrik Ibsen is arguably the most important dramatist since Shakespeare (and second only to the Bard in productions worldwide). More than a century after his death his works live on, their themes still fresh, their flinty view of society’s lies and hypocrisies still remarkably contemporary. Yet, in his own time, Ibsen could barely make a living, didn’t gain any measure of recognition until he was well into his forties, and even then was no stranger to controversy. He may have fought for freedom and truth, but many critics felt he was nothing more than a pervert and a crank. A typical early review of Ghosts called it “a dirty deed done in public.”

What is public and what is private is at the heart of Ghosts (the original title in Norwegian means “the ones who return”). Ibsen believed the first requisite of a decent life was the ability to look honestly at one’s actions and in this play he gazes unflinchingly at the Norwegian society from which he came. What he sees is a vast gap between what is said and what is done.

Reputation in this world has little or nothing to do with reality.

What fascinated and infuriated Ibsen were the lies that society forces people to tell themselves and each other. And if society doesn’t exactly force us, it certainly exacts a heavy price if we step out of line: shunning, loss of status, financial ruin. In the character of Pastor Manders, the playwright gives us a man of spotless reputation, a guard-dog of all of his society’s most cherished values: Duty, Sacrifice, Appearances. Here is a man who can counsel a desperate, battered wife to go back to her abusive husband without a qualm. Nothing, he tells this trusting woman with perfect certainty, is more important than what is expected of you.

Manders is matched by the freedom-and-truth-seeking woman at the heart of the story, his old friend Helena Alving. Through this passionate character, Ibsen examines the lies that create the cloak of “respectability” and the price people pay to wear it. Everyone in the play wrestles to some extent with what they “should” do. The restrictions imposed on them from without – and from within – murder their hearts, choke off their good nature and prevent them experiencing any “joy of life.” They never speak the real truth and so they never experience any genuine freedom.

The ghosts of the title are not only skeletons in peoples’ closets that can shake their reputations and ruin their social lives. They are also the longings and desires that return, again and again, no matter how much we try to deny them. As Helena says: “Whenever I take up the newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea … We are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

As with any great drama, the light must inevitably dawn for all of the characters, and they must live with the startling revelations it brings.

Biography While a controversial writer in his own time, Henrik Ibsen is now regarded by many as the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. His works – classics such as Hedda Gabler (1890), Peer Gynt (1876) and A Doll’s House (1879) – have left an enormous impact on Western literature and theatre, challenging theatrical conventions and influencing many other noted playwrights and novelists, such as Neil Simon, Arthur Miller and George Bernard Shaw. Born in 1828 to a wealthy merchant family, his father eventually went bankrupt, forcing the family to move out of their estate in Skein, Norway to a much smaller house outside the city.

This experience would inform much of Ibsen’s writing, which often focused on financial difficulty, family secrets and moral indiscretion. Ghosts (1881) caused a sensation when it premiered for its “shocking indecency” and was roundly criticized, but has since come to be one of Ibsen’s best-known and most respected works.

Background Notes by Associate Artist Paula Wing.

soulpepper production Jacqueline Robertson-Cull

Phil Atfield

Geoff Hughes

cutter (menswear)

sewer (womenswear)

head of hair & makeup

Stefan Dean Ming Wong sewers

Janet Pym

Mike Keays

sewer/dresser

carpenter

Kathleen Ballos Greg Chambers Fina MacDonell

Sarah Armstrong breakdown artist

props builders

Duncan Johnstone head scenic artist

Paul Boddum Steve Hudak scenic artists

soulpepper thanks: Mar-Lyn Lumber Sales Ltd., PRG Toronto.

Soulpepper Theatre Company is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (pact), the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (tapa) and Theatre Ontario, and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Scenic Artists and Set Decorators employed by Soulpepper Theatre Company are represented by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

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YOUNG CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS DISTILLERY HISTORIC DISTRICT