Famously, the King of Sweden saw it and told Ibsen it was not good, to which the playwright replied, exasperated, “Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!” Over the next several years it opened in Sweden, Berlin, Denmark, Norway, London, and New York. No Scandinavian theater would stage it, so it premiered at the Aurora Turner Hall in Chicago, Illinois on May 20th, 1882. Ibsen penned the play in 1881 while living in Rome. Ibsen actually didn’t like the translation of “ghosts,” chosen by the first English translation William Archer, for the Danish word more accurately translates as “things that walk again.” However, that longer translation-along with the proposed alternative “The Revenants”-was ungainly and were thus not used. The “ghosts” of the title are metaphorical, referring to outdated traditions and the lingering strains of the sins of the father that continue to “infect” their offspring. Ibsen, always quick to build on such constructive feedback, decided that his next play, An Enemy of the People, would be about just that: a man who finds out the water supply is polluted but nobody wants to listen to him and believe the ugly truth.Horror fans will be disappointed to learn that there are no spectral figures commonly identified as ghosts in Henrik Ibsen’s groundbreaking stage drama Ghosts. When a London theatre (eventually) staged it, one critic called it ‘an open sewer’. Curiously, the first performance of the play was in Chicago, of all places. He knew he needed to give society a glimpse of itself in the mirror, what Oscar Wilde, a few years later, would call ‘the nineteenth century dislike of realism the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.’Īt first, no European theatre would dare to stage Ghosts: it remained a play on the page rather than stage, largely unsold, and Ibsen’s name was mud for a while because the play provoked such a strong negative response when it was published. Ibsen himself later told the King of Sweden that he had to write the play elsewhere, he wrote that he knew the play would shock readers, and that if it didn’t, he wouldn’t have needed to write it in the first place. It’s easy to see why Ghosts caused such an uproar.
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