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.

When a London theatre (eventually) staged it, one critic called it ‘an open sewer’. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this. Ghosts Show full title By Henrik Ibsen 3 / 5 ( 172 ratings ) About this ebook The winter of 1879-80 Ibsen spent in Munich, and the greater part of the summer of 1880 at Berchtesgaden. The play destroys the faade of the traditional family, speaking freely about infidelity, incest and venereal disease. At the time of its production in 1882, it was immediately criticized for its subject matter. Curiously, the first performance of the play was in Chicago, of all places. In Ghosts, Ibsen covers multiple controversial topics. 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