Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

Ibsen wrote Ghosts in 1881, two years after he put his fist through the expectations of audiences across Europe with A Doll’s House. Both the earlier play and Hedda Gabler (and An Enemy of the People, which is far more conventional, a kind of blueprint for the American realist social-problem melodramas of the twentieth century) are performed far oftener, but Ghosts is still startling. It was my introduction to Ibsen in a freshman theatre history class, and it turned me into a lifelong devotee. It’s the playwright’s most devastating attack on his continual target, the cowardice and self-delusion of the middle class, its worship of dead ideas that hang around like ghosts and block the road to freedom and happiness. In the play, a young painter, Oswald Alving, returns home from Paris to his mother on an island off the Norwegian coast just as she completes an orphanage on their property that is intended as a memorial to her dead husband. Her son can barely remember Captain Alving but she has always held him up as a paragon of virtue. Oswald arrives worn out and frightened; a French doctor has diagnosed his condition as vermoulu – worm-ridden. It’s syphilis, though Ibsen couldn’t use the word in 1881. (It hardly made a difference; the play was even more of a scandal than A Doll’s House had been.) Oswald blames himself, but it’s Mrs. Alving who leads him to the truth: that the disease is the legacy of a profligate father whose moral righteousness was a spectacular lie, the invention of his widow. Ironically, she sent her son away so that he might escape the moral dangers of a corrupt household; her maid, Regina, to whom Oswald is attracted, turns out to be his half-sister, the consequence of Captain Alving’s seduction of an earlier domestic. And the worst is yet to come. The syphilis has affected the young man’s brain; he is seeking a merciful death as soon as he reverts, inevitably, to childish helplessness. In the final scene he entrusts his mother with this unspeakable task and then, moments later, the attack arrives suddenly and she is left with the morphine pills in her hand, faced with an impossible decision. The curtain falls.

O’Brien begins his production with a rehearsal of the opening moments of the play. The actors wander the stage, scripts in their hands, as Ella Beatty as Regina and Hamish Linklater as the alcoholic carpenter Jacob Engstrand, who raised Regina and whom she has always believed to be her father, struggle with the first few lines. This choice doesn’t work – it’s awkward and feels imposed – but I think I understand what the director is up to. It’s an attempt to suggest the process by which actors shake a great work of art out of the pages of a script by inhabiting it. And, as the production shows us, they can only do so by wringing it out of themselves. In his realist masterpieces Ibsen commences with the well-made melodrama conventions of the nineteenth century that he will end up exploding, and when they’re produced the opening scenes, where exposition is provided, usually or partly by ancillary characters – that’s one of those conventions – are usually performed with at least a veneer of Victorian propriety, even in Ghosts, where Regina disdains her adoptive father and can hardly stand to be in the same room with him. (Ibsen leaves open the possibility that he abused her; that seems to be the subtext in the BBC version, with Natasha Richardson in the role and Freddie Jones as Engstrand.) But O’Brien’s actors barely bother with surface. Linklater, a supremely witty actor, makes Engstrand’s manipulations, both his failed ones with Regina and his easily achieved ones with the local pastor, Manders (Billy Crudup) – who arrives a few minutes later to go over the papers for the dedication of the orphanage with Mrs. Alving (Lily Rabe) – both comic and sinister. (He has the minister, who believes that Engstrand has reformed, in the palm of his hand, and as the play goes on he squeezes.) At first I thought that Linklater was a little extravagant in his effects and that Beatty made Regina’s flirting with Oswald (Levon Hawke) too obvious. But what O’Brien is directing all the actors to do is grab their characters by the hair and pull. That process becomes clearer later in the play, when Engstrand really gets to work on Manders and we get to see the steel behind Regina’s charm.

Linklater and Beatty are excellent; the other three actors, who have the most complex roles, are prodigious. Crudup finds a complexity in Manders that no one else in my experience has gotten to, though Adam Kotz in Richard Eyre’s fine production at the Almeida in London (with Lesley Manville as Mrs. Alving and Jack Lowden, the co-star of Slow Horses, as Osvald) came closest. The pastor is usually played as if his repressed Scandinavian Christianity were a sort of glue encasing him; sometimes that stiffness is funny, and you feel Ibsen can’t help burlesquing him. Crudup’s credulousness gets a few laughs, but his approach is the exact opposite of the usual one: he’s more like a counselor at a Christian summer camp, full of eagerness and optimism. But underneath he’s terrified. When Mrs. Alving learned in the early days of her marriage that she’d bound herself to a man without a moral compass she ran away to Manders, with whom she’d fallen in love, and he sent her back, persuading her that her duty was to stand by her husband and become a helpmate for him. When she reports in the course of the play that the pastor has believed in her lie all these years – of a happy marriage that brought salvation for both husband and wife – her revelation undermines his entire belief system. That is, of course, Ibsen’s point; Manders is the play’s representative of a set of mummified conventions that enslave this society. But instead of depicting the character as frozen to his convictions, Crudup makes us see what it would cost him to admit they might be wrongheaded. The more he’s challenged, the more desperately he fights. This man is addicted to the happy endings he’s appended to the stories of his parishioners, as if they were characters in the Scribe and Sardou well-made plays that Ibsen’s audiences preferred and that the playwright labored so diligently to dismantle. So when Helena Alving informs him that Engstrand was a partner in the lie, and Manders is furious at his dishonesty, it’s a cinch for Engstrand to come up with another fairy story that makes himself look noble and self-sacrificing. Manders is equally invested in the romantic fable of a reformed drunk who behaves like a prince.

The other actors whose portrayals of Oswald have made a strong impression on me have all seemed grounded. So when the character make his case to his mother for euthanizing him, its reasonableness is shocking; it drags you straight into the tragedy. Levon Hawke is slender and pale; he appears insubstantial, as if he might float away on the wind. He has an almost spectral presence – my theatregoing companion commented that he looks like he’s already on his way out of this world. Hawke has only a handful of credits and none of them in live theatre, yet here he is in a New York house giving a fully accomplished performance utterly without affectation.

Lily Rabe and Billy Crudup. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

The production, which was beautifully designed by John Lee Beatty (set), Jess Goldstein (costumes) and especially Japhy Weideman (lighting), doesn’t make a big deal out of the period setting, but I had no trouble situating the twenty-first-century actors in it, even when they sounded like contemporary Americans. Mark Rowe hasn’t imposed contemporary slang on the text as so many adaptors like to do with Ibsen and Chekhov. He’s pared it down but treated it with respect, and the actors seem easily at home in it, as the cast of Vanya on 42nd Street did with the David Mamet take on Chekhov’s dialogue. Lily Rabe moves through Mrs. Alving’s island home with unstressed command of the space. She already had that ease when she played Portia opposite Al Pacino’s Shylock in her late twenties, but now she has gravitas as well. Rabe has a cracked-walnut voice that suits her sinewy elegance, and it finds the granite corners in the prose to gnaw on. Ibsen’s dialogue is tougher to speak than Chekhov’s: it sometimes sounds high-flown. Rowe kneads it a little; he gives the players ridges to settle into so they come across as plain-spoken. That frees them – and especially Rabe, whose role is a kind of Mount Olympus for an actress – to get straight to the feeling without tumbling into melodrama. Her performance is an emotional excavation; by the time you get to the final scene between Mrs. Alving and her Oswald you can’t believe how deep down she’s gone. I’m not sure how to talk about how she and Hawke play this scene, because I was too engrossed to focus on what they were doing formally. That little voice in a critic’s head that points out the wonders of technique even in the midst of what’s intended to feel like pure emotion had, for once, fallen silent.

Among other things, this Ghosts is a paean to theatrical legacy. Lily Rabe is the daughter of the playwright David Rabe and the late actress Jill Clayburgh. Hamish Linklater (who is Rabe’s real-life partner) is the son of the famous vocal coach Kristin Linklater, who died in 2020. Ella Beatty’s parents are Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. And Levon Hawke is the son of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke; he looks like his mother and sounds like his father. It’s impossible not to feel the presence of their antecedents; they are the benevolent ghosts of this production. The historical importance of the play and its author are, of course, another kind of legacy. Ibsen’s groundbreaking realist texts symbolize the beginning of modernism in the theatre; that’s why they’ve always felt so exciting to me. But this time around I saw Ghosts in quite a different light. The emotions Jack O’Brien’s production unleashes are primal; it connects back to the devastating power of Greek tragedy. I’ve always known this was a great play, yet I’ve underrated it.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.