Review: Ibsen’s Ghosts, Starring Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, and Billy Crudup

Generational wealth, the financial support past generations offer the future, is something to which all families aspire. It can ease life’s discomforts, provide the launchpad for a dream, or, more darkly, hold an individual in suspended adolescence by footing the bill for ceaseless hedonism. Generational wealth is also the spectral protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play Ghosts, now receiving an off-Broadway revival at Lincoln Center Theater with a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe. Over a century later, it still shocks with its candid portrayal of mental illness, although perhaps not as aggressively as it once did.

It takes place on a small island off the Norwegian coast in the home of Helena Alving (Lily Rabe), widow of respected public servant Captain Alving, who has been dead for 10 years. Mrs. Alving is founding an orphanage in her late husband’s name with the help of Pastor Manders (Billy Crudup). But behind his sterling public reputation lies a dark truth that Mrs. Alving has labored hard to conceal. The captain was a lecherous drunk who sired at least one illegitimate child, Regina (Ella Beatty), who now works as the family maid and is blissfully unaware of her true parentage.

Mrs. Alving even sent her son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), away so he would not be influenced by his father’s behavior. She is determined that he will inherit nothing from his father, not even his money (that’s what paid for the orphanage). Oswald has now returned to Norway from Paris, where he has been living an artist’s life. But unable to paint in the Norwegian gloom and increasingly self-medicating with booze and tobacco, he is exhibiting signs of an old family curse. More distressingly, he is also showing an indecent amount of interest in Regina.

Like an ancient Greek dramatist praying at the altar of the truth, Ibsen contrives to show how Mrs. Alving’s strenuous efforts to conceal her husband’s debauchery have led the family toward destruction, with Manders acting as her guide to the brink. Crudup portrays a perfectly irritating clergyman, a shrill edge of judgment in his voice when he encounters the slightest infraction, like when he gets a load of Mrs. Alving’s reading list (Flaubert, Twain, and Darwin). When Mrs. Alving tried to leave her husband years ago, he’s the one who led her back. The audience despises him and revels in Mrs. Alving’s demolition of his delusion.

Rabe shows that this is a task best performed with open-mouthed incredulity. She stares at the pastor perfectly still, as if she cannot quite believe a man with so many white hairs still believes the nonsense he spouts. A widow who lends a smokey bourbon voice to the wisdom of all women who have lived long enough to discern the lies on which polite society stands, Rabe cuts a thoroughly modern figure even in Victorian garb (the austere and effective costumes are by Jess Goldstein).

Less relatable but no less watchable is Hamish Linklater, who is Rabe’s spouse in real life, and who plays Jacob Engstrand, Regina’s adoptive father and the most Christ-like figure in the play—a carpenter who dutifully takes the blame for the sins of others (no one is accusing Ibsen of subtlety). Linklater is a like a lovable shaggy dog who keeps getting kicked by bourgeois Christian propriety and yet keeps going back for more.

In hiring Beatty (daughter of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty) as Regina and Hawke (son of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke) as Oswald, casting director Daniel Swee seems to be making some commentary on fame as a legacy that, like money, is both a blessing and a curse—mostly the latter when one considers the wooden performances here.

While the acting is hit-or-miss, director Jack O’Brien has delivered a tight 100-minute drama with a handsome production. The floor-to-ceiling windows of John Lee Beatty’s set tell the story of a small island community where everyone is constantly surveilled. Japhy Weideman’s lighting subtly focuses our attention, while sound designers Mark Bennett and Scott Lehrer underline key moments with notes of tension.

O’Brien has oddly chosen to frame his staging with what appears to be a table reading at the very beginning of the play, similar to the way Igor Golyak approached Our Class. The actors, scripts in hand, repeat their lines in a monotonous fashion under harsh work lights, which quickly disappear as the play begins in earnest, only to reemerge at the curtain call, which features the actors slumped in their chairs as if they have just read the play’s devastating conclusion for the first time. It’s a strange metatheatrical flourish that doesn’t add much to the play, which stills gets its message across without directorial additions.

Of course, it’s quite easy to sit in the dark and guffaw at the pastor’s outmoded notions, but much harder to turn the spotlight back on oneself and ask the vital questions Ghosts should provoke. What are the irrational orthodoxies and lies governing your life? What about your behavior will be viewed as baffling and hilarious 100 years from now?