Pastor Manders begins to despair that he might have to resign because of the inquiry that will happen. Engstrand jumps in and reminds the Pastor about the seamen’s home. She tells Manders, who is due to take the next steamer out, to take the papers so she can be done with it all. In a clipped tone, she says that maybe this is all for the best, and that the “Home” would not really have been that for anyone. Alving returns and says that Osvald will not be talked out of leaving the ruins. The Pastor is uncertain and paces about in disbelief that he could have accidentally done something like that, even though he does not remember.Įngstrand continues, painting a picture of the press mistreating him. He claims that he saw the Pastor take one, snuff the flame, and throw the wick into some shavings. Gleefully and slyly, Engstrand states that it is a shame Pastor Manders is to blame for this, as he was the one responsible for the candles.

He also begins to complain about Engstrand being after him to talk about something then, Engstrand himself enters. He sighs to Regina that this is the most terrible night he’s lived through. Alving goes to look for Osvald and the Pastor comes in. Alving and Regina are standing together, stunned that the whole orphanage burned down. 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.It is still night in the same garden room. 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.

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen