Ghosts at Theater an der Wien

Are we ever honest enough to remain unmoved by lies? This is the question dealt with in Henrik Ibsen's drama Ghosts on which this ballet is based. "Ghosts is a psychological thriller in which the characters discover more and more about their own stories," says director Marit Moum Aune about the evening. "The theme is the way something unspoken can grow to become something unbearable. It requires enormous courage to make one's peace with one's own illusions." Together with the young choreographer Cina Espejord, she retells Ibsen's drama as a ballet to music by Nils Petter Molvar. They are placing the story on the stage as danced theatre because the immediacy and power of expression of dance is especially well suited to portraying internal and external brutality.



The young Osvald Alving gives up his bohemian lifestyle in Paris and returns to his home town in Norway. Nobody suspects that he is soon to fall prey to imbecility owing to cerebral softening. He is ironic and distanced in his dealings with other people. His mother welcomes the son who was so painfully missed, but only slowly realises the condition he has returned home in. And gradually secrets come to light that weigh heavily not just on his family, but on Osvald personally. step by step, ghosts from the past destroy the facade of the respectable middle-class family which is only maintained with difficulty. When Osvald's hopes of marrying the young Regine are dashed because it emerges that she is his half-sister and the product of an affair his father had with one of his employees, he falls into despair. The only person who stands by him when the cerebral softening moves on to the next stage is his mother, who is also forced to expose painful secrets from her own life.