Productions
Ghosts was not performed in the theatre until May 1882, when a Danish touring company produced it in the Aurora Turner Hall in Chicago. Ibsen disliked the translator William Archer's use of the word "Ghosts" as the play's title, whereas the Norwegian "Gengangere" would be more accurately translated as "The Revenants", which literally means "The Ones who Return".
The play received its first performance in Sweden at Helsingborg on 22 August 1883.
The play achieved a single private London performance on 13 March 1891 at the Royalty Theatre. The Lord Chamberlain's Office censorship was avoided by the formation of a subscription-only Independent Theatre Society, which included George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and Henry James among its members.
Ghosts was first produced in New York City on 5 January 1894, and by the New York Independent Theatre, in 1899, with Mary Shaw as Mrs. Alving. Alla Nazimova, with Paul Orleneff gave a notable production of Ghosts in a small room in the Lower East Side. When Nazimova was a student in Russia she wanted to “play Regina for my graduation piece at the dramatic school at Moscow, but they would not let me. Ghosts was at that time prohibited by the censor, because it reflects on the Church.”
Read more about this topic: Ghosts (play)
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—Annie Boudinot Stockton (1736–1801)
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—Thomas Brackett Reed (1839–1902)
“It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)