Gespenster: Ein Familiendrama in Drei Aufzügen

Helene Alving believed she could bury her husband's sins along with him. For years she has maintained a facade of respectability on her Norwegian estate, concealing Captain Alving's affairs and the disease he bequeathed to their son. When Oswald returns from Paris, pale and exhausted, the careful pretense begins to crack. As Pastor Manders arrives to dedicate an orphanage built in the dead captain's name, long-suppressed truths emerge with mounting ferocity. Regine, the household's sharp-tongued servant, discovers she may be the captain's natural daughter. Engstrand, her carpenter father, schemes and manipulates. What unfolds is Ibsen's unsparing indictment of Victorian morality: a world where religious platitudes mask hypocrisy, where respectable families hide venereal infection, and where the sins of the father are visited upon the children. Ghosts was banned, reviled, and called obscene. It also inaugurated modern drama.