" GHOSTS."

Press, Volume L, Issue 15022, 17 July 1914, Page 7

" GHOSTS."

| ... ~-m — .____.„ THE BAN REMOVED AT LAST. ("Time-" and "Sydney Sun" Services.) LONDON, July 15. The first licensed performance of "Ghosts" took place at tho Haymarket Tneatre. Tho play still appals, but owing to the advance of public opinion, no longer shocks.

Wo refer to this in our leading columns. The following extract from a notico in tho "Daily Telegraph" of a recent "privtate" performance in London gives a good idea of tho play's subject and purpose:— Ibsen's "Ghosts" is like a Greek play. It resembles a tragedy of __schylus or Sophocles in the inovitableness of its incidents, tho certainty of its ultimate doom, We watch the growing fate which bangs over the head of Oswald Alving, just as we shudder at the destiny that awaits Agamemnon and the tragic end to (Edipus's kingly power. And tbo play is built on simple solid lines, gradually rot .aling a crescendo of interest through all its three, acts, until at the piteous close wo eeo Mrs Alving face te face with tho ultimate ruin and hear o_wald crying for the sun. Moreover, it is a fine moral story, despite or because of its intrinsic ugliness. Here we learn how the sins of the fathers are punished in the children and how remorselessly Nature avenges the infraction of her laws. Mrs Alving tried to break the sequence of effect on cause by cherishing the idea, for the public eye, that her late husband was a moral benefactor instead of a dissolute rake. In the same spirit sr.o sent her son away from his home that he might never know the truth, and start his ca_ ier cxci. »t .-om his fa .1: antecedents. But destiny ib not baulked in this fashion, and the mother who kept up an elaborate deception from the best of motives is forced to see her son imitating, with the girl Regina. tho sensual follies of her husband and succumbing before her very eyes to tho horrible mental maladies of those who inherit diroasc as their melancholy birthright. It is an appalling play to watch; ard Ibsen is so grimly iv earnest with his moral, so savagely bent on drivi/ g ■.■',_ _ home, that ho will spare us no jot or tittle of the horror. Pity and fearnever were the old tragic elements of Aristotle so ruthlessly illustrated by an unflinching moralist.