Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ at Lincoln Center

Say what you want about critics. None of us can carry a candle to Daily TelegraphClement Scott in 1891Review the premiere of London for Henrik Ibsen ghosts:

This disgusting representation … the modern theater affects the poison … an open depletion; Uncharged author. A dirty verb publicly done; Lazar’s house with all its doors and windows are open … the total, almost rotten … the literary running … mysterious things …

When the play was published in Copenhagen nine years ago, it caused this anger that each of almost 10,000 copies sat in a warehouse. (If he does not suffer from the financial loss, Epsen may have enjoyed the paradox: in the same play, one of the characters raises her eyebrow in another to condemn the books that he never read) ghostsEpsen. This is not a good play. ” – Epsen exploded, after a long and terrible stop,” Your Majesty, I king To write ghosts! “

This type of wild history can offer new products with luggage – not because we are still disintegrating through public discussions on genital diseases, incest, suicide with help, and blatant moral hypocrisy, but because … how do you rise to the level of all of this? How can ghosts Continue, if not to send us to crime spasms, then they are still and bleeding, not the shock of our sensitive constitutions but our conscience, which, after all, was along?

Jack Operation’s new attempt on the truth bomb in Epsen-at the present time-does not answer much on this question as much as it is from the branch of another less interesting magazine: What happens if you put a group of famous people in the show, and for the vast majority of the 110 minutes, do you play straightly straight? In a new, simplified translation, low concept by Irish theater writer Mark Uru, this ghosts The founder does not represent exactly, but he does not chase or terrify either. Do you feel stumbling between times and impulses: the eighties of the nineteenth century or now? Pluled or not? Is tragic without shame or mysterious paradox? There is a quality converted into Eleeven in the transformations of the Ibsen plot and the ethical confrontations that can be difficult to embrace without incurring a certain amount of contemporary-nervous, separate, or otherwise laughter. But the man also has his evil feeling of humor. The director of his plays these days records the audience as much as the procedure on the stage: When do you want them to laugh? When do you need them to be pulsed?

O’Brien has not practiced this type of academic control, and instead of transferring us between persuasive extremism, the offer, as soon as it continues, tends to ski in the mid -comfortable area. The main guidance gesture is a framing device that feels, if any, with less than the depths of the play than the external anxiety surrounding production: on the simple John Lee Beatty simple wooden floor – it has a wall of windows and decorated with one wooden table and various homogeneous furniture – actors enter the amazing buses. Although the audience calms down quietly, the sound designers Mark Bennett and Sakut to wiren they maintain the homing of the sounds that poison the atmosphere, as if there was another invisible crowd in the room with us, and they are still talking, waiting for the show to start. In clothes that try to skiing on the gap between modern street clothes and the characters of the period quietly (fashion is Jess Goldstein), the group moves in the space as if it had just reached the rehearsal. It carries the binding programs in the green cards. Hamish Linklater is drunk jacob engstrand, and finds a large part of four times and a roll of Gaffer’s bar in a drawer. Ella Betty watched her, plays the role of his daughter, Regina-a maid in the Alving family of the upper degree on an island off the coast of Norway-while drinking the bloc to the bottom of one foot. EngStrand, with good intention, waste, and unlucky, suffers from an old leg wound that he is fond of reminding the people who kept him “standing for the honor of women.” When Linklater and Beatty begins speaking, they initially do this in flat colors and reading – reading from their textual programs, in reference to the unaware rain. They stop and return to the top and do it again. Oberian made them repeat the beginning of the play several times, and put in more realism (i.e. more theater) with every going. Soon after the textual programs, the father and her daughter disappeared closely with each other, and fixed gray rains are filtered under the top windows.

It’s – interesting. Especially watching Linklate – which is largely served the most persuasive performance – in obtaining an extreme and affected life. But I am still not sure that I know what everything is related to it ghosts. What is going on around the heart of this play – which is struggling with the social and cancerous social punishment that, in hiding abuse and corruption, ends with the passage of its infection on the generation through the generation – which requires the transition on the stage from non -donations to performance to complete performance? One can go to the school course and began drilling for intellectual justification: Something is something versus originality, something, truth and lies … But the impression in the room is more than the lack of conceptual security, and the connection of something – anything – to an old theatrical introduction because you do not fully trust in entering the play itself. The irony is that as soon as things roll, theatrical, dead, or largely other questions evaporate. O’Brien still seems compressed to add A. gesture Here-and often, the Japhy Weideman lights become a fascinated while something fateful in the sound design, but these moments feel fake calm, calm from the melodrama to what is a play in the form of a play.

Thanks to Ibsen, this is still a magical shape. In a large old house on that Norwegian island, five lives come to a fiery point of the crisis: Helna Elving (Layla Rap) is preparing to open an orphanage for her late husband, who everyone remembers as a base for society. At the same time, she welcomes her son’s home, Oswald (Livver Hook), who has lived abroad since childhood and who – does not cultivate to the presence of a family counselor for the family. Ozwald brought a secret secret, but it does not prevent him from release the looks in Regeina, who is struggling with her own social aspirations and pressures from the father’s chaos to leave her rich mistress and return home. It was the title of Ibsen Danish for the play Genganger Literally “who return” or, more distinct, “Revenants”. There is a mysterious and delicious thing in the word that “ghosts” lack-that can apply to both Ozwald and his dead father, who soon entered one time when the son reveals his terrible news: he dies from syphilis, and according to the doctor who diagnosed him, he was “eating from birth” from birth. Helena notes Ozwald far at the appropriate time to keep a bright image of his father, but she only knows the truth: Captain Alfing was “corrupt”, “obscene and wandering”, and the thing that consumes the brain of her son from the inside to the outside is the free – his toxic legacy.

No, anyone says the word “syphilis” in ghosts – In Epsen or, in particular, in Uru. Yes, on the one hand, if you know ghostsYou know that it is the play of the famous syphilis, but I found myself wondering about the members of the audience who may not reach this familiarity. “Eating from the worm” and the equivalent word used by Oswald, the French VermoloCrawling and poetic, but it is difficult to spread it on this day and this age to generate an immediate feeling of destructive dangers. Perhaps this doesn’t help (one of the show numerous children to famous O people; His sister He will star in Eurydice In the signing later this spring) he has a natural characteristic of it. He is steeped, golden and remarkably cold for a person who is supposed to disintegrate his minds. His interpretation is so constantly feeling that it may be difficult to maintain a fist in the heart of the tragic, or moral play. “I Hate The way people judge the way of our life! “He exploded at one point, while Reverend Manders is trying to draw his friends Parisian artists as enemies of family values.” How, due to a moral shortage of themselvesThey are trying to turn our freedom into something, something shameful. ”Say it with a higher voice, Oswald!

Meanwhile, on the side of Oswald in the middle of the plot, Helena’s Helena and Crudup’s Manters feel that she did not succeed in dancing. Despite all the agreement of the priest and the priest’s lashes, there is a flame between them, but these people are somewhat cool until the point of collapse in which Manders finally indicates a clear indication of it. Crudup is a great actor, and a click is also a harsh Part – one of Epsen without a defect but in one way or another not creatures without a soul. He disturbs, preserving himself, almost, almost naive, but it also has real wells of kindness and mercy, and the desire to be better without courage to do so, and believe in love without muscles. I have a feeling that Crudup performance may expand and focus throughout running, and find more rooms in the complex home home. If this deepening and sharpening in Operen production is likely to be another question. Now, this ghosts It does not actively shake us as much as it reminds us that, in its ancient bones, this ability to have a death still exists.

ghosts He is in Mitzi I Newhaus at the Lincoln Center theater until April 26.