Hattie Morahan as Helene Alving
Sam Wanamaker Theatre
December 2023
Photo by Marc Brenner
074 – Ghosts, by Henrik Ibsen
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Although Henrik Ibsen’s dark family drama Ghosts was written more than 140 years ago it still retains the power to shock. Its treatment of sexual disease, incest and euthanasia caused outrage in 1881, with critics describing it as “unutterably offensive”, “an open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged”, a “putrid play”. Booksellers returned copies unopened, and no European theatre would produce it. The play did not receive its English language premiere until 10 years later, and that evaded the censor only by being presented in a single private performance. The play’s unflinching portrait of repressed truths and social hypocrisy has proven enduring because the conflcit between truth and hypocrisy is a universal source of human drama.
As we record this episode a new adaptation of Ghosts, written and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons, is playing in the Sam Wanamaker theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London until 28th January 2024.
To discuss this wonderfully powerful play, I am joined by Kirsten Shepherd, who is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. Kirsten’s research interests include the relationship between modernism and theatrical performance, and more specifically for our purposes, the writings of Henrik Ibsen.
During our conversation, Kirsten and I referred several times to Ibsen’s earlier play A Doll’s House, which was the subject of our very first episode:
001 A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
Kirsten Shepherd
Kirsten Shepherd is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University. She received her B.A. in English from Yale University, after which she spent a year studying Nordic Literature and Languages at the University of Oslo before earning her D.Phil. from Oxford. She has held teaching posts at the Universities of Birmingham and North Carolina State before joining the English faculty at Oxford in 2007.
Kirsten’s research interests include the relationship between modernism and theatrical performance, and more specifically for our purposes, the writings of Henrik Ibsen. Her first published book wasIbsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890-1900 published back in 1997, since when her other publications include The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (2020), Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2016), and Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (Columbia University Press, 2015), as well as numerous contributions to journals and critical collections.
Kirsten has been a guest on Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” on the episode devoted to Ibsen, and has acted as consultant on productions at the National Theatre, the Oxford Playhouse, the Old Vic, and most recently her article “Challenging the Brand” appeared in the programme for the current production of Ghosts at the Globe Theatre.
Recommended Play
Kirsten recommended Wit by Margaret Edson.
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113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
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