Free Thyself

By T.E.K.

GHOSTS by HENRIK IBSEN

A young man returns from Paris to the small Norwegian town of his birth and tells his mother that syphilis has doomed him to madness and death.

Mind you, he never uses the word syphilis. His mother obliquely informs him that his pitiable fate is a hereditary legacy from his late father, a sordid libertine. The height of Victorianism (1881) was not the best possible time to treat such matters on a public stage, and the vituperative abuse heaped on Ibsen for his effrontery has probably never been equaled in the history of drama.

Not surprisingly, the passage of nearly a century has robbed Ghosts of its shock effect; it has also clarified our vision of the play. Obvious now is the fact that syphilis was Ibsen's symbol rather than his subject. The disease stands for all that is twisted and stunted when life is held in thrall by narrow, provincial social conventions. People in such a society, Ibsen shows us, are not so much a prey to quiet desperation as to desperate hypocrisy.

Ibsen's theme is universal. In American terms, it means that Ibsen would approve Sherwood Anderson's vision of the crabbed, tormented, camouflaged souls of Winesburg, Ohio, rather than the blithely idealized innocents of Thornton Wilder's Grovers Corners. In European terms, James Joyce perhaps came closest to Ibsen when he wrote, "Ireland is the old sow that eats its own farrow."

Joyce idolized Ibsen, and the two artists have much in common. Like Joyce, Ibsen lived by "silence, exile and cunning," fleeing Norway to live abroad for 27 years. Both men abandoned their native countries physically and yet were able to repossess and be possessed by them psychically and aesthetically. As a parallel to the Greek dictum "Know thyself," both Ibsen and Joyce say "Free thyself." This is no faddish preachment to "do your own thing" but a call to an austere heroism and indomitability that dares to stand alone.

The finest compliment one can pay the off-Broadway Roundabout Theater revival is that it brings out all the Joycean echoes in Ibsen. When it falters, it is simply that few actors are intrepid enough to scale the sheer rock face of Ibsen's perdurable realities. sbT.E.K.

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