Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Henrik Ibsen, adapted and directed by Morris Panych
Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto
October 14-November 18, 2011
“A Ghost of the Real Thing”
Soulpepper’s first-ever production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic Ghosts (1881) has a handsome design and an excellent cast. What it lacks is a director who can draw sufficiently complex performances from his actors. The production presents Ibsen’s parallel plot lines and related symbolism quite clearly, but, for a play dealing with such emotional topics as adultery, syphilis and euthanasia, the action is curiously uninvolving.
Because of its subject matter Ghosts was Ibsen’s most controversial play in his own lifetime. Some shallow-minded thinkers thought that the advent of penicillin rendered the play obsolete--that is until the arrival of AIDS made the notion of an inheritable sexually transmitted disease more relevant than ever. Yet, Ibsen’s plays have lasted not because he wrote about contemporary issues but because he treated them as metaphors for universal conflicts. The virtue of director Morris Panych’s production is that it does show us the universal in the particular in Ibsen’s play. The flaw is in how Panych tries to convey it.
The character who presents the greatest difficulties is Pastor Manders (Joseph Ziegler). His unyielding conservative Christian dogma has determined the past of the Alving family and led to the series of misfortunes they now suffer. He is a believer in a divinely ordained hierarchical system of fealty--mankind is subject to God’s will, parishioners to their pastor, women to men, wives to husbands and children to parents. When Mrs. Alving fled her abusive, sexually profligate husband, he forced her to return to him telling her it was her duty and her suffering God’s will. He chides her for having sent her son away from home when he was seven even though she did so to protect him from his father’s pernicious influence. The play is ultimately not a play “about syphilis” as people first characterized it as much as it is a play about the inadequacy and actual harm of using of a black-and-white dogma of any kind as a guide or a solace in confronting the real world.
Since Pastor Manders represents that dogma the obvious trap is that his narrow-mindedness too easily makes him seem a figure of fun. This is a trap that Panych, more used to directing comedy than tragedy, falls into headlong. We must not look on Manders as a humorous character because that negates our appreciation of the damage he has done and continues to do, all in God’s name, to the Alving family. Panych has Ziegler present Manders as weak, easily confused and foolish, whereas the play makes no sense if that is true. How could he have convinced so strong a woman as Mrs. Alving to return to her husband if he is so weak? How could he persuade her to do something so illogical as not to insure the orphanage she has built if he does not have a strong force of will? He must have held some attraction in the past or how could Mrs. Alving have once been in love with him? Manders’ restrictive views should be frightening, not funny.
It would appear that Panych wants his Mrs. Alving to be a pillar of quiet strength with a strong sense of irony, until the truth of her son Oswald’s illness breaks her down. To that end he has Nancy Palk play the role with supreme reserve, regarding Manders’ follies with benign indulgence. Palk does this very well and has never looked so poised and imperturbable. It’s just too bad that this play requires a much different approach. Her patronizing attitude to Manders elevates the humour, but that’s the opposite of how Manders should be approached. When she agrees to Manders’ self-serving request not to insure the orphanage she has built to honour her husband, we wonder how she could so calmly do something she knows is foolish. When she shows no reaction to the orphanage’s destruction, we know Panych has carried Mrs. Alving’s restrained stance too far.
Mrs. Alving is a far more complex character. We should see that faith and doubt are at war within her. Why would she give Pastor Manders so much control over her pet project unless she respected him and his views? The fact that she has allowed her own step-daughter to be raised as her maid hardly reflects an egalitarian spirit. The play more sensibly is seen as reflection of Greek tragedy where the central figure encounters an increasingly devastating series of revelations. The first of these should be Oswald’s flirtation with the maid Regine that echoes her husband’s more violent attack years ago. The next should be the destruction of the orphanage. Panych has Palk react to the first as if she fully understood its meaning and react not at all to the second. In fact, Mrs. Alving is as guilty of hubris as Manders. She thinks she has protected Oswald from harm from his father and she thinks she can make a lie true by dedicating a charitable institution to a sinner. Yet she finds she has power to do neither. The damage in which she is complicit has already been done. Panych basically gives Mrs. Alving no height of pride from which to fall and thus undermines the effect of the drama.
Feeling that Ibsen’s tragedy could use more comedy, Panych has Diego Matamoros overplay the character of Jakob Engstrand until he becomes a caricature of the perpetually drunken peasant who can still hoodwink the higher born. What Panych misses, as with Manders, is Engstrand’s malice. He is, after all, someone who seems willing to prostitute his own daughter.
The two who come off best in the production are Michelle Monteith as Regine and Gregory Prest as Oswald. While Monteith shows as much as she could that Regine chafes under her yoke of servitude, she does rise to a such high pitch of righteous anger when she discovers who she is that she should win a round of applause. Prest is excellent at presenting Oswald as increasingly feverish right from the beginning. He so carefully escalates the sense of Oswald’s inner suffering that the ending does not come as a surprise but as a logical conclusion to what has come before.
Ken MacDonald has created a beautiful set that, as so often with him, serves as a metaphor for the story. All the action takes place in a conservatory attached to the Alving’s home which, like Manders’ archaic views, represents a narrow confining space where the characters live. As it approaches the audience the veneer vanishes to reveal the structure underneath just as in the play truth that had been hidden gradually comes to light. Dana Osborne has designed beautiful period costumes for each of the characters, especially the elegant, richly brocaded gown for Mrs. Alving. Thomas Ryder Payne has developed a subtle but eerie soundscape of foghorns, sounding buoys and ringing church bells that combined create a perfect atmosphere of unease. Alan Brodie uses lighting to evoke the claustrophobia of constant rain outdoors. Panych does not ask Brodie for a bigger effect for the burning of the orphanage, an event he unaccountably wishes to play down.
Panych’s adaptation conveys the underlying structure of Ibsen’s play well enough that it can be recommended to anyone who has never seen the play on stage before. However, those who have--whether it be Stratford’s production in 2006 with Martha Henry and Peter Donaldson or Stagecraft’s in 1998 with Diane D’Aquila and Stephen Russell--will know that there much more depth to the characters than Panych is willing to bring out.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gregory Prest and Nancy Palk. ©2011 Sian Richards.
For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.
2011-10-15
Ghosts