In Ghosts Osvald Alving returns home only to. 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. These three plays focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling and exposing lies. When a London theatre (eventually) staged it, one critic called it ‘an open sewer’. It was there that he wrote his first play. When he was 15, Ibsen moved to Grimstad to work as an apprentice pharmacist. Born in Skien in Telemark 20 March 1828, died in Kristiania (now Oslo). Curiously, the first performance of the play was in Chicago, of all places. Norwegian playwright, theatre director and poet, and considered the father of modern realistic drama. 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.
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