Ghosts and Other Plays

Ghosts and Other Plays
ISBN: 9780140441352
Publication Date: 1 January 1964

'I am haunted by ghosts. When I heard Regina and Osvald out there, it was just was if there were ghosts before my very eyes'

The plays in this volume focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them. In Ghosts, Osvald Alving returns home only to discover the truth about the father he always looked up to, and learns the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. It was Ibsen's most provocative drama, stripping away the surface of a middle-class family to expose layers of hypocrisy and immorality.

A Public Enemy sets two brothers against each other when one wishes to make public the facts about the polluted water in the public baths of their home town.

And When We Dead Wake tells of an artist meeting an old lover by chance and rejecting his wife, in a symbolic exploration of Ibsen's own literary life and the sacrifices he made in his work.

Peter Watt's translation maintains the colloquial tone of the original dialogue. He has also provided an introduction and notes on the texts.

About The Author Henrik Ibsen was born of well-to-do parents at Skien, a small Norwegian coastal town, on March 20, 1828. In 1836 his father went bankrupt, and the family was reduced to near poverty. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad. In 1850 Ibsen ventured to Christiania - present-day Oslo - as a student, with the hope of becoming a doctor. On the strength of his first two plays he was appointed "theater-poet" to the new Bergen National Theater, where he wrote five conventional romantic and historical dramas and absorbed the elements of his craft.

In 1857 he was called to the directorship of the financially unsound Christiania Norwegian Theater, which failed in ...