Malin K

Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen’s opera Gespenster, based on Ibsen’s Ghosts, with a libretto by me, is being staged at the Meininger Staatstheater. This is the same theatre where the first public performance of the play in Germany took place in 1886 under the direction of the theatre’s owner, Duke Georg II. The original premiere date was May 2020, but covid19 postponed it to 23 February 2024. 

My task was to transform a nearly 140-year-old three-act play—in its original text, rather outdated and extensive—into what was initially intended to be a one-hour chamber opera for a small ensemble. Along the way, the project grew. We suddenly had more space, both in terms of length, stage size, and number of instruments and singers. And then Covid-19 came, and the project was put on hold indefinitely. But then in 2022-23, we got the green light again and made a fairly extensive revision, because new ideas had forced their way in.

When the play was published in 1881, it was rejected by theaters and strongly criticized in the Nordic countries because it was seen as an attack on the existing social order, which it certainly was. Society has changed a lot since then, so my motivation when I started working on the material in 2017 was to find and reinforce aspects of the text that are still relevant today. I tried to imagine what Henrik Ibsen might have had the same characters say and do today.

Although the original version of Ghosts is still being staged around the world, I find the play vague, archaic, and cumbersome. The text is retrospective; the characters mostly talk about events in the past, and little action is shown on stage. I have therefore chosen to write in more dramatic action in the here and now, and to take up threads that Ibsen himself only vaguely refers to.

When I began my research, I quickly realized that I did not want to keep the work as a window into a long-gone era. Writing for opera is also quite different from writing for theater. Singing a sentence takes much longer than speaking it. Therefore, the text had to be cut down from about 22,000 words to a maximum of 3-4,000 words. The words not only had to be good to sing, they also had to retain both their dramatic and poetic-artistic quality. My text was then translated into German (by Dagfinn Koch), and with the new language came additional layers of linguistic challenges. As mentioned, we changed quite a bit, both in terms of plot and language, not least in collaboration with the two German dramaturges Corinna Jarosch in 2019 and Julia Terwald in 2023. There have been about 18-19 versions of the text. While writing, I completed about half of a bachelor’s degree in intellectual history at the University of Oslo before Covid-19 put a stop to it. My studies were very helpful for my writing.

The first person I contacted was dramaturg Kristian Lykkeslet Strømskag, who was at the National Theater in Oslo at the time. He gave me good advice and, not least, access to Ingemar Bergman’s rewritten version of Ghosts from 2001. Bergman helped me not only to understand what Ibsen probably meant. As I said, I find the play so vague that it is not easy for non-Ibsen connoisseurs to understand it completely. Bergman’s version also helped me to more easily choose what should be kept and what should be changed. Not only did I choose to interpret the play as radically as I could, I also wrote in scenes that Ibsen only hints at might have happened, and chose to focus on other themes. In order to write about something that is taboo today, in the spirit of Ibsen, I chose to give the role of “the bad guy” to the mother Helene instead of the father. Why is it still considered more unsettling when mothers abuse their children, both mentally, physically, and sexually?

I decided early on to take the play apart and put it back together again. I chose to remove the fire in the newly built asylum and thus also the focus on religion and society’s possible negative reaction to a possible insurance claim, as well as Helene Alving’s reading of controversial literature. I would rather focus on “internal fires.”

First and foremost, I want to focus on the role of women and mothers when they are also abusers, as well as contribute to the discourse on men as victims of women’s violence. In my writing beyond this, I also work with complex interpersonal relationships, including abuse and violence. Statistically, women are most often the victims, but men are also vulnerable. There are large numbers of unreported cases for all genders, and queer/trans people are perhaps particularly vulnerable? We know too little and have too little data and research, but what we can say with certainty is that there are many more men who are victims of violence from women than are reported. There are many reasons for this. I hope that this play can be part of the discourse around this issue.

The play also deals with love triangles, lost love, infidelity, children with parents other than those stated on their birth certificates, narcissism, grief, longing, incest, illness, euthanasia, and suicide. I wanted to explore how secrets can change and destroy individuals, and how people can harm themselves and others, both inadvertently and as a result of relationships that have become poisoned.

Early in the process, I gave the composer what I called a word bank: a series of words and expressions that fit into the scene in question. This was intended as compositional possibilities, for example to give the characters who are not involved in the scene in question something to sing. I imagined the words and phrases woven into the background as a kind of abstract choir, helping to emphasize the action and what the characters are thinking.

I have tried to retain Ibsen’s words where it is natural to do so, but large parts of the text are my own words, spiced with selected, reworked sentences taken from a “deconstruction poetry” processing of the play. The process can be described as a method of constructing new sentences from the words in a given text, thereby generating new text material. I have used this method in a previous video work, Nemesis from 2015, where I photographed all the words in the cast Ibsen quotations along Karl Johans gate in Oslo and put them together into new sentences (sound design by Dagfinn Koch). Some of the text fragments from Nemesis have also been included in the libretto Gespenster. Those who are particularly interested can find more information on my website www.malink.no.

ABOUT THE PLOT

I want to show Helene Alving’s intrusive, unpleasant memories. That is why I let her be on stage both as a young woman and at her current age. I also let deceased characters appear on stage alongside the living, as a kind of ghost to show Helene’s memories. Initially, I wanted to let several of the characters, not just Helene, be in several ages at the same time, perhaps even future versions, but this became too complicated. However, having the opportunity to study a person at different times in their life is an exciting way to develop their character and create drama on both an internal and external level.

Since the fire and the events surrounding it have been removed, I have chosen to place Erik Alving’s death in the present. The action as I have written it takes place in the days immediately following his death. This gives the characters an opportunity to be in the same place.

It has been crucial for me to consider what aspects of this play are relevant in the present day. As I see it, it seems strange that Helene Alving and the maid Regine would now live alone in this house for as many years as they do in Ibsen’s original text; in the long years between Erik Alving’s death and Osvald suddenly, almost without reason, but perhaps because he is ill, deciding to come home. Without the fire in the asylum, Pastor Gabriel Manders has no reason to be there either. That is why I have written that he comes to bury his old friend.

As Ibsen wrote the play, Osvald was sent away to boarding school by his mother as a small child. Would a mother today really send away her 6-year-old to spare him from his father’s wild life, as Helene claims was the reason? Unlikely, especially in Norway, where many mothers’ lives revolve entirely around their children’s lives. Without restraint, many mothers expose large parts of their children’s lives on social media, showing off perfect, glossy family lives. A mother in Norway today would also probably (hopefully) divorce her husband if she truly feared for her child’s welfare in this way.

Therefore, I had to come up with a reason why Helene and Erik do not separate. In my libretto, Erik has committed a white-collar crime that Helene has discovered, which keeps them both trapped under the threat of prison and a dramatically worsened standard of living. This, along with the knowledge that Erik is actually Regine’s father, becomes a looming secret and a means of power between the spouses. I have written that Erik has always loved his wife, but that she has always rejected him in a very hurtful way. Over the years, the spouses have amused themselves with arguments colored by mutual contempt and hatred. I imagine that Osvald must have been deeply damaged by growing up in this terrible family situation. The fact that both parents argued constantly is bad enough, but I have also written that Helene used her son as a substitute for her husband in every conceivable way. Including sexually. His mother took advantage of him and got far too close to him, gaining power over him, both mentally and physically. I imagine this situation as just as powerful an image of human degradation as him being sent to boarding school as a child.

Regine is Erik’s daughter, while Osvald is Gabriel’s son. They are not siblings, and could actually have been together. But there are so many emotions, love, hate, old grudges, and terrible deeds between mother and son that the mother chooses not to tell the truth. She cannot bear to see the two find love, and tells them that they are siblings, which causes Regine to leave for Jacob.

I therefore choose to have Osvald, in order to punish his mother, only pretend to be seriously ill. He loves to see her suffer. The only way he can really punish her is by removing himself from her. Osvald tells his mother that “he has Charon’s coins” while holding up a box of pills. He means this as a metaphor: payment to the ferryman for the crossing over the river Styx, i.e., a means to die. At the end of the play, Helene is completely alone, apart from her son. Her husband is dead, her lover long gone, she has no friends left, and now even her foster daughter Regine wants to leave her. When she truly realizes that Osvald is actually going to die, she decides to follow him. I therefore have mother and son enter into a suicide pact instead of following Ibsen’s original text. She cannot bear the thought of being alone, and she refuses to allow him to leave her again. But Osvald chooses to pretend. He feigns a seizure so that his mother thinks he is dying and gives him the pills. He spits out the pills, gets up, and leaves the stage. I couldn’t resist the temptation to give him justice and redemption. He had to be given the chance to save himself and create his own life.