Espectros
Event
Prodigal son, Osvald Alving returns to his parents' home with an “infection”, a disease that breeds phantasmagoria. In his presence, the shadows of a set of “old-fashioned attitudes and dead beliefs” are thickening, the “ghosts” that poison the present and mortgage the future. Confined to a dark place from which no one leaves or enters, the characters of Espectros [Ghosts] (1881), by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, live “afraid of the light”, dissatisfied with the suppression of their affective lives, hungry for a vital impetus that will free them from an existence governed by conservatism and the omnipresence of money. “With Ibsen”, wrote George Steiner, “the history of drama begins anew. This alone makes him the most important playwright after Shakespeare and Racine”. The stage director Nuno Cardoso includes him in the repertoire of this Teatro Nacional, in a noteworthy gesture. "What do we inherit?" asks Helene Alving, Osvald's mother. We inherit a strength from the past, so strong and persistent that it continues to resound in our “few and wicked” days.
