Theatre
The Great Actor
By ALAN BRIEN Ghosts. (Old Vic.) had brought to the Queen the lessons it brought to Mrs. 1 WAS wondering, on my way home from Ghosts, how far life Alving. And then it occurred to me that this was a pretty beastly and shocking and show-off sort of thing to wonder about. After all, Mrs. Alving had been blackmailed into marriage by her sexual and spiritual advisers, her parents and her pastor, with one of the out-of- work rich. And this spongy playboy husband, having given her the minimum of pleasure for her labour pains, inseminated her with a son, riddled at birth by microscopic syphilitic worms. But, please, take your hand off your headed writing paper, stop scrabbling for your desk pen, that opening sentence is only borrowed. It should be disinfected by quotation marks, picked up in antiseptic italic tongs, for it comes from Bernard Shaw's outrageous review of this obscene Scandin- avian import in 1897, the year of Victoria's Jubilee. My opening remark was inserted only in order to demonstrate that Ghosts still has power to curdle the blood and boil the brains—despite the condescension of today's critics.
That infectious yokel Syphilis (who was named after an antique shepherd cursed by Apollo in a Sicilian pastoral) is still called by old-fashioned GPs with a taste for metaphor—the Great Actor. In Ibsen's Ghosts, the Great Actor plays not the lead but the prompter's part. The spirochod pallida remains an' off-stage symbol shadowing the action with scarcely more reality or tangi- bility than the spire of Solness in The Master Builder, or Rita's untouched champagne in Little Eyolf. Yet it is the perfect symbol, because it is inside the characters as well as inside the prose, for the Freudian birthmark which parents cannot avoid embossing upon their children, for the Marxian guinea stamp which the rich can never afford to eradicate. A manic's a manic for a' that.
It is sheer insensitivity to label Ghosts as the intellectual's hand-sewn version of Damaged Goods. Brieux, like all propaganda melodrama- tists, stages a fixed fight where the challenger is carried down the aisle in a stretcher and the Cham- pion cannot lose. Ibsen knows that tragedy makes strange bed-fellows and the more evenly matched the wrestlers arc on the mattress, the more impres- sive the tussle will be. Mr. Alving never appears. We are ready to brand him as a hypocrite and satyr on the evidence of his reluctant, neglected wife. But soon we begin to wonder whether Mrs. Alving is not as much to blame. The husband was born to be a social criminal—but perhaps he was too over-privileged to know better. Mrs. Alving was not born to be a victim—she chose the role of the sacrifice and surely the butcher must be excused if the lamb rubs its neck against the knife. Then, both we and Mrs. Alving suspect that she is the sour grapes whose eating set the child's teeth on edge. And the play ends with the son, regressing paralytically into childhood, with wry neck and slack mouth and hungry tongue searching for the childhood she denied him. in fact, as the curtain falls, suddenly Mrs. Alving becomes the parody New Woman—an Ibsen heroine as she was in the audience not as she is on the stage. If she had car- ried out her twentieth-century ideals to the logical conclusion in the nineteenth century she would have been ruined but guiltless. If she had never heard of lbsenism, she would have been equally ruined but guiltless, But caught in the no man's land of the unfulfilled ideal, she demonstrates Blake's proverb—go desire and act not, breeds pestilence.' Now she is ruined, guilty and con- scious of her fate. This is the essence of the modern dilemma.
This seems to me to be the choreography of the ideas in Ghosts. But Ibsen was a producer as well as a dramatist and he knew from the inside the strength of the 'well-made play'—especially when built with alternate sticks of dynamite. The shell of naturalism was fitted over an explosive kernel of fantasy like a hive over a buzzing ball of bees. The fault of Ghosts is not that it is out of date, not that Mrs. Alving's home life is so different from that of our own dear queen. There is still no penicillin to cure the symbolic syphilis which rots humanity. And yet, despite Ibsen's choreo- graphy, there is something wrong with the dancing at the Old Vic. Some critics have tracked the fault down to the performance of Michael Hordern as Pastor Manders. It is true that Mr. Hordern is essentially a caricaturist—a hoppity, skippity burlesquer who cannot help showing through the people he plays like a schoolmaster bursting out of a schoolboy uniform. But this time he is acting a character who is already a caricature. Ibsen has mined all Manders's dialogue with squibs which explode in his face on every page: singeing his pretensions, and blackening his protestations. There is just no way of convincing an audience— especially one conditioned to suspect the good intentions of clergymen—that Manders believes his own forged bona fides are genuine. He cannot help being as transparent as Falstaff. The fantasy is leaking out of a hole in the hive.
Ghosts must be carried by Mrs. Alving and her Oswald: Flora Robson is handsome, tough, eloquent and courageous—one of our great male actors. Her essential feminity remains secreted well below the surface. But Mrs. Alving should glow with the desperate red-hot weakness of a Lady Macbeth in high-button shoes. Instead Ws Robson displays the sang-froid of the First Murderer. She accepts the news of her son's syphilis with an air of District Nurse facing an epidemic of sniffles. 'You mustn't scream,' pleads Oswald as he unravels the medical details. 'NO need to agitate yourself,' begs the Pastor. Miss Robson is no more likely 'to cry or flinch than the sphinx is. In her monologues she once again proves herself a brilliant and moving soloist. When she disintegrates at the final curtain it is like watching a Dame Myra Hess suddenly go mad on the platform. But- in the dialogue she tends to underplay and understress all those terrible ironies (such as her boast 'My son must inherit everything from me') while Michael Hot dern simultaneously whoops up the more super tidal ambiguities of his part. As an ensemble they too often seem as innocently tedious as a Shakes spearian Lady chit-chatting with her Fool.
The Oswald of Ronald Lewis is a life-like Little Billec going literally to the bad—a teeth-grinding head-splitting dummy thirsting for drink and Ilesb to poultice his sores. But the other two characters —the curvaceous maid and her 'corkscrew father —provide only thin supports. Especially Daniel Thorndike, who plays Engstrand as such grotesque blend of Uriah Heep and Doolittle (did Shaw pinch Eliza's father from Ghosts?) that even Michael Hordern seems almost life-size.
Ghosts is a flawed achievement by a great roman- tic-naturalist who has buried his own sturdy subtleties behind a barrage of theatrical tricks• But even a half-success half-sucdessfully acted from Ibsen is worth a bloodless triumph from more contemporary and more fashionable names.
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