Up the Fjord

By JAY COCKS

GHOSTS by Henrik Ibsen

The shades that stalk this play are the primal spirits of guilt and corruption, blinding faith and annihilating morality. Fate is the conjurer that commands them all to appear, but it is the blameful black magic of repression that sets them free to destroy. Most tragedies are about the fall from grace, but Ibsen, in Ghosts, wrote about something rather different and, for its time (1881), revolutionary: the absence of grace, the force of destiny when truth is hidden.

Only imagination is needed, and a concentration of spirit, to make Ibsen's great dramas burst into bright flame. This brushfire production, imported to Broadway from Washington's Kennedy Center, dampens the spirit of the text and absolutely extinguishes its immediacy. Burnt down to basic melodrama, Ghosts creaks like a mediocre television serial. Its terrible symmetry has here all the impact of a bad night at Falcon Crest.

Liv Ullmann is Mrs. Alving, who must watch her dead past revive, her dreams destroyed and her only son slip into syphilitic madness, all in a day. As Ullmann has proved under the direction of Ingmar Bergman, she is an actress of depth and stature. This time, however, she seems mostly at sea, or up the fjord. Director John Neville (who also chews through the role of Pastor Manders) has staged Ibsen as if the playwright were the resident bard of the Vincent Crummies Acting Company from Nicholas Nickleby: all pregnant pauses, awkward gestures, broad hints and unexpected laughs. Neville's Ghosts seems to have taken a wrong turn in the provinces and wound up, startled and unprepared, on the main stem. --By Jay Cocks

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