| Description | Prodigal son, Osvald Alving returns home to his parents with an “infection”, a disease that engenders phantasmagorias. In his presence, the shadows of a set of “old-fashioned attitudes and dead beliefs” thicken, the “spectres” that poison the present and mortgage the possibilities of the future. Circumscribed to a dark place where no one leaves or enters, the characters of Specters (1881), by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, live “afraid of the light”, unhappy with the strangulation of their affective lives, eager for a vital impulse that frees them from an existence governed by conservatism and the omnipresence of money. “With Ibsen,” wrote George Steiner, “the history of the theater begins anew. This is enough to make him the most important dramatist since Shakespeare and Racine.” The director Nuno Cardoso inscribes it in the repertoire of this National Theatre, in a programmatic gesture that is important to underline. “What do we inherit?” asks Helene Alving, Osvald's mother. We inherited a force from the past, so strong and persistent that it continues to echo in our “few and soulless” days. |
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