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A Ghosts That Doesn’t Go Mad
Jack O’Brien’s new Ibsen adaptation could use a couple more brainworms.
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. 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.
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