The Norwegian Television Theatre’s Gengangere 1978

Abstract

With the arrival of the new mass media the conditions of production and reception of performances of texts written for the stage became radically altered. Even in the age of silent film, a number of Ibsen’s plays were made into films. No playwright apart from Shakespeare has had more films made from his plays than Ibsen; the number is at present somewhere between 50 and 60. Ghosts is no exception. While a theatre tends to be loyal to a certain tradition in staging and acting style, a film-maker is somehow freer to introduce deviations from the original play. In an American silent film version of Ghosts made in 1915, Chamberlain Alving was presented on the screen, played by the actor who had Oswald’s part. The intention was, one can imagine, to emphasise the idea that the sins of the fathers are repaid by the sons, or at least to stress the family likeness. In a more recent film, Joseph Losey’s 1973 version of A Doll’s House, with Jane Fonda as Nora, a number of exterior scenes, showing the wintry Norwegian town of Røros, were added, changing the important frame of that drama somewhat in the direction of ‘A Doll’s Town’. This is as a result of the demands of the audience: the spectators want to see what on the theatre stage is merely referred to in the dialogue, and it may be difficult for a film director to deny them a close-up of the wild duck in its basket or a view of the orphanage on fire.