Word of the dramaturg:

“Preparing the play Ghosts took a couple of months, but the feeling is we’ve been working on it for years. In the last three years I worked with Andrej Nosov on four plays, and each now seems like a stage on the road to this Ibsen text. All the themes, motives and ideas we were after – the fear of Bent, the anger of Hinkemann, the sadness of Hunger and the all-pervasive hopelessness of Werther – are sublimated in this play.

Ibsen’s Ghosts is one of the bourgeois dramas of his middle, naturalistic period, which were among the foundational texts of early twentieth-century theatre. The play, written in response to the scathing criticism he received over Doll’s House (Nora), is, along with Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People and Pillars of Society, part of the grand project to “transpose” ancient Greek tragedy into the bourgeois salon, the new center of social conflict where the past is discussed and the future determined. In essence, it is a problem play about the institution of marriage, small-town life and the position of women in bourgeois society – still held down, albeit now with invisible chains. The attack on Nora was provoked by Ibsen’s conclusion that for the woman marriage is prison, and that the only way for her to break free is to leave. With Ghosts and Mrs Alvig, Ibsen effectively posits the premise: what if Nora hadn’t left her husband, and then develops it all the way to its ultimate consequence: Mrs Alving’s life was doomed to failure the moment she chose duty over freedom, and all her attempts to give it some meaning merely brought her closer to ruin.

In Ibsen’s plays there is a lot of talk, and little action. Through all that talking the past gets constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed and destroyed, and with it the characters who lived it or invented it. At the heart of it all is the big lie that needs to be exposed, like the core of the onion, by a painstaking process involving tears and the odd cut. In that sea of words with their various implications, contradictions, ambiguities and unfinished thoughts, one can easily lose sight of the essence of the characters and the plot. The same line appears in the third scene and the ninth, the subtext being completely different; but how to establish a connection, with all the digressions, passive aggressiveness and anecdotes from the past lying in between?

Everything with Ibsen can look outwardly empty unless it’s inwardly full. And that is why this play is a sublimation of the previous four. Because, over and over again, this team of theatre workers set itself the task of making things inwardly full.

With the previous plays, we didn’t set out to create, at all costs, an ‘alternative’ to mainstream theatre in Serbia, but we certainly did try to exemplify through our work that which concerns us and which we think is lacking in our theatres. Without lies, without pointless showing off on the part of the writer, director or actors, without creating a spectacle at any price, without cheap tricks based on the “swear word means laughter” principle.

The guiding principle in all our work is that what’s happening on stage should be happening ‘here and now’.

That’s how we made Ghosts. In this play the most intimate emotions of the characters are explored and displayed, emotions that arise from interaction with other characters in a world that doesn’t care.

Ghosts could be ‘the last act of a tragedy’, but the play was deliberately taken in another direction: all is set in a minimalistically stylised salon, where questions relating to the past and future of characters from (our own) bourgeois class, which promised much but achieved little, are resolved in a day. Still, this isn’t “incisive social criticism”, nor a “comprehensive theory on what is wrong with us and how to make it right”, but above all a play about the characters who find themselves trapped with no way out. Here emotions aren’t acted, nor being proven, they are there, simple, pure, inwardly full. Here and now.

Mrs Alving wishes to put an end to the sort of life she has lived and the horror she has been through. But that life has concrete consequences which both she and Oswald and Pastor and Regina and Engstrand must now face. There is nothing there that will change the fate of humankind, appease the gods or right the wrongs of history. There are just lives that must be lived and emotions that must be felt. It is a fire that must burn, the fire which is the reason they are shown the way they are, the fire which is the reason why the director, all the actors and the entire team of this play are in the theatre.”