[0:09]Ibsen was a writer who dominated my thinking ever since I became a play right really. I was intoxicated by them, by their savagery and their poetry and the tautness of the drama- dramaturg. And Doll's House was exemplary of all of those qualities.
[0:33]Nora Helmer lives an apparently idyllic life with her husband Torvald Helmer and their children. And years, five years, I think before the play started, her husband had what I read as being a nervous breakdown. In order to pay for his treatment, she borrowed money and has spent the last five years trying secretly to pay it back. And the play charts the moment when she realizes that the debt is going to be found out. At the end of the play, her husband finds out about the debt is appalled and she says, like, I'm not, I can't live with a man who's going to contain me like this. And she leaves, and that was a shocking moment in European theater, the notion that the woman could leave her husband and leave her children, and she slams the door. the decision he made when he when he started to write the Doll's House, um, in the in the 1870s, is he decided to write these plays about contemporary everyday life in his home country. So Ibsen is a great radical by insisting on naturalism. I think it's received as a, uh, feminist tract and a celebration of female independence. And while I think that's a consequence of what Ibsen was writing, I don't think it was the intention of what Ibsen was writing. I think Ibsen was writing in my opinion something much more existentialist, uh, something more related to people trying to be true to themselves and not having their identity imposed on them by other people. And I think that's definitely true of Nora. What Nora is doing through that play is she's struggling to be true to herself. But for that play to really work, you have to see what it costs her to do it. She's not just leaving her husband, she's leaving her kids and she'll never see her kids again. She'll have no status in society, she'll be a real outcast. It's a real disaster. Now, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen. That's what's so profound about it. She realizes the mess that she's made and and has to and has to change everything in order to clean it up. And that extremity, I find really extraordinary.
[3:05]The play is called Ghosts because the ghosts of the past do haunt us. Mrs. Alving, who has had a marriage with a terrible man who's now dead, has presented him, the dad, as, uh, a model, as a remarkable figure. Um, there's an orphanage being built in his name and and most importantly, she has told her son that he was an incredible man. And he comes home actually for the opening of the orphanage in the father's name. We discover above all that he's ill, he's very ill, he's got syphilis, and he's going to die. And of course what has happened is that he's inherited it from his dad. His mom, who is trying to be a modern woman, is dealing with the the nightmare of how to how to tell him the should she tell him the truth or should she protect him from the truth? Guilt and the past weighs on on all of us. Ghosts is eternal because it's about the relationship between uh, a mother and a son. I mean an elemental relationship, the most heart rending line in the whole play is when the son Oswald is arguing with his mother and says, I didn't ask to be born. And this is this is the eternal cry of the the child who is impotent in the face of their inheritance. I think any playright who continues to be performed has some sort of elemental quality. What's fascinating about his work is that he sits on these boiling, tumultuous, volcanic feelings and applies a kind of lid to them, and they burst out with a a sort of seismic energy. He's a brilliant storyteller.
