Almeida Theatre and Sonia Friedman Productions by Henrik Ibsen Season Sponsor: Adapted and Directed by Richard Eyre
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BAM 2015 Winter/Spring Season #IbsensGhosts Brooklyn Academy of Music Alan H. Fishman, Chairman of the Board William I. Campbell, Vice Chairman of the Board Adam E. Max, Vice Chairman of the Board Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Joseph V. Melillo, Executive Producer Ghosts BAM Harvey Theater Apr 11, 18, 25, May 2 at 2pm Apr 7—11, 14—18, 21—25, 28—30, May 1 & 2 at 7:30pm Apr 5, 12, 19, 26, May 3 at 3pm Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission Almeida Theatre and Sonia Friedman Productions By Henrik Ibsen Season Sponsor: Adapted and directed by Richard Eyre Design by Tim Hatley Lighting by Peter Mumford Sound by John Leonard BAM 2015 Theater Sponsor Casting by Cara Beckinsale CDG Leadership support for BAM’s presentation of Ghosts Associate director Elena Araoz provided by Betsy and Ed Cohen/Areté Foundation With Lesley Manville, Billy Howle, Will Keen, Leadership support for Scandinavian programming Brian McCardie, Charlene McKenna provided by The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Major support for theater at BAM provided by: The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation The Francena T. Harrison Foundation Trust Stephanie & Timothy Ingrassia Donald R. Mullen Jr. The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc. The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund The Shubert Foundation, Inc. The SHS Foundation Cast Lesley Manville Billy Howle Will Keen Brian McCardie Charlene McKenna Ghosts CAST, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Regina Engstrand Charlene McKenna Jacob Engstrand Brian McCardie Pastor Manders Will Keen Helene Alving Lesley Manville Oswald Alving Billy Howle Adapted and directed by Richard Eyre Production manager Simon Sturgess Design by Tim Hatley Costume supervisor Rachel Woodhouse Lighting by Peter Mumford Wig creator/Hair designer Angela Cobbin Sound by John Leonard Company stage manager Laura Draper Casting by Cara Beckinsale CDG Deputy stage manager Jenefer Tait Associate director Elena Araoz Production electrician Stephen Andrews Literal translator Charlotte Barslund Production photography Hugo Glendinning American stage manager R. Michael Blanco General Management—Fiona Stewart for Sonia Friedman Productions This adaptation of Ghosts was first presented by the Almeida Theatre at the Almeida Theatre, London, on September 26, 2013 and subsequently transferred to Trafalgar Studio 1 in the West End of London, on December 17, 2013. The West End production was produced by Sonia Friedman Productions and Almeida Theatre with Rupert Gavin, Tanya Link Productions and JFL Theatricals /GHF Productions, in association with 1001 Nights. The actors are appearing with the permission of Actors’ Equity Association. The American stage manager is a member of Actors’ Equity Association. IBSEN PRODUCTIONS AT BAM An Enemy of the People, 1960 fall Peer Gynt, 2006 fall Players-on-Tour, American Academy of Dramatic Arts National Theatre of Bergen/ Norwegian Theatre of Oslo, Norway The Wild Duck, 1981 spring | BAM Theater Company John Gabriel Borkman, 2011 spring A Doll’s House, 1991 spring Abbey Theatre (Ireland) Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden The Master Builder, 2013 spring | BAM Peer Gynt, 1993 spring Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden An Enemy of the People, 2013 fall Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Germany) Ghosts, 2003 spring Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden A Doll’s House, 2014 spring | Young Vic (UK) Nora (A Doll’s House), 2004 fall Ghosts, 2015 spring | Almeida Theatre (UK) Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Germany) LECTURES Hedda Gabler, 2006 spring Sydney Theatre Company (Australia) BAMtalk: Re-imagining Ibsen for the 21st Century with Marvin Carlson, Eric Stubø, Joan Templeton, 2006 fall Hedda Gabler, 2006 fall Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Germany) Edward Howard Griggs Lecture: A Doll’s House— Ibsen the Teacher, 1939 spring The Wild Duck, 2006 fall National Theatre of Norway, Oslo Ghosts Lesley Manville. Photo: Hugo Glendinning GHOSTS Ibsen wrote Ghosts in 1881 while in Rome. A run of 10,000 was first printed in December of that year by his publisher, Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag (Copenhagen). Ibsen had suspected it would be controversial, but it caused much outcry due to its treatment of topics including the church, free love, and venereal disease. In fact, booksellers refused to display it, foregoing the need to reprint it until 1894. It was nonetheless first produced theatrically in 1882 in Chicago, performed in Norwegian for an audience of Scandinavian immigrants. It was first produced in Europe in 1883 by August Lindberg’s company in Helsingborg, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. Its Norwegian premiere, in Christiania (Oslo), was critically praised and ran for at least 75 performances at the Mølldergadens Theater. HENRIK IBSEN (1828—1906) Ibsen, the eldest of five children, was born in the coastal town of Skien, Norway into a family that fell into poverty when he was eight. He worked in an apothecary, writing and painting in his spare time, and wrote his first play, Catilina, in 1850. He was employed in theaters in Christiania and Bergen, counting among his jobs poet and director, and began fully focusing on writing in 1862; he spent the next decades in Italy and Germany. After a number of verse plays, including Brand and Peer Gynt, he wrote 12 monumental prose plays, including many presented in theaters throughout the world and at BAM in recent years. —Susan Yung A Note from the Director Richard Eyre. Photo: John Haynes Ibsen said of Ghosts that “in none of my plays the impression that the characters exist is the author so completely absent as in this last independently of the writer and have come to one.” Nine years later, when he was 61, Ibsen life spontaneously. “Sitting in judgement on met an 18-year-old Viennese girl and fell in love. oneself” means mediating one’s ideas, emotions, She asked him to live with her; he at first agreed and anxieties through one’s characters, who in but, crippled by guilt and fear of scandal (and their turn have to absorb the subject matter into perhaps impotence as well), he put an end to their bloodstream—in the case of Ghosts: moral the relationship. Emilie became the “May sun cowardice, patriarchy, class, sex, hypocrisy, of a September life” and the inspiration for the heredity, incest, and euthanasia. In that sense character of Hedda Gabler, even if Ibsen himself Helene Alving, the protagonist of Ghosts, is as contributed many of her characteristics with his much an autobiographical portrait as Hedda: fear of ridicule, his apparent repulsion with the yearning for sexual freedom but too timid to reality of sex, and his yearning for emotional achieve it, fearing the wrong moral choice, freedom. Perhaps his disavowal of authorial longing for love. “Ghosts had to be written,” said presence in Ghosts was a little disingenuous. Ibsen. “I could not let A Doll’s House be my last word. After Nora, Mrs. Alving had to come.” When he was working on the play he wrote this to a friend: “Everything that I have written is Ibsen’s great women characters—Nora, Hedda, most minutely connected with what I have lived Rebecca West, Hilde Wangel, Petra Stockmann, through, if not personally experienced… for every Helene Alving—batter against convention and man shares the responsibility and the guilt of repression. Some, like Nora, triumph; others, the society to which he belongs. To live is to war like Helene, fail. Ibsen empathizes, actually with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in identifies, with women both as social victims judgement on oneself.” and as people. “If I may say so of an eminently virile man, there is a curious admixture of the The audience for a play has to be left with woman in his nature,” said the 18-year-old A Note from the Director James Joyce. “His marvellous accuracy, his faint 1883, in Norway, where the reviews were good traces of femininity, his delicacy of swift touch, and it ran for 75 performances. Even the King of are perhaps attributable to this admixture. But Sweden saw it and told Ibsen that it was not a that he knows women is an incontrovertible fact. good play, to which, in some exasperation, Ibsen He appears to have sounded them to almost responded: “Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!” unfathomable depths.” In England the Lord Chamberlain, the official Yet in spite of—or is it because of?—his censor, banned the play from public performance sympathy for women and morbid view of the but there was a single, unlicensed “club” state of society, you emerge from Ghosts with performance in 1891 on a Sunday afternoon at a sense of exhilaration, albeit underscored by the Royalty Theatre. It detonated an explosion the conclusion that it’s impossible to achieve of critical venom: “The experience of last night joy in life. In the face of the bones of true demonstrated that the official ban placed upon experience, you feel that the great enemy, apart Ghosts as regards public performance was both from social repression and superstition, is to be wise and warranted”; “The Royalty was last night bored with life and indifferent to its suffering. filled by an orderly audience, including many “The voice of Henrik Ibsen in Ghosts sounds ladies, who listened attentively to the dramatic like the trumpets before the walls of Jericho,” exposition of a subject which is not usually said the great political activist, Emma Goldman. discussed outside the walls of an hospital”; “It is “Into the remotest nooks and corners reaches a wretched, deplorable, loathsome history, as all his voice, with its thundering indictment of our must admit. It might have been a tragedy had it moral cancers, our social poisons, our hideous been treated by a man of genius. Handled by an crimes against unborn and born victims.” As with egotist and a bungler, it is only a deplorably dull Chekhov, Ibsen sees boredom and indifference play”; “revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous”; as insidious viruses that infect all society.