Ghosts

In Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, the sins of the past are visited upon the innocents of the present. Many years ago, Mrs. Helen Alving accepted her pastor’s advice and stayed with her husband despite his many infidelities. Ten years after Alving’s death, she is to dedicate an orphanage in his memory. Her son Oswald, kept ignorant of his father’s sins, returns home for the ceremony. Oswald’s attraction to the housemaid conjures up the ghost of his parents’ unhappy marriage; this ill-starred romance, along with Oswald’s increasing illness, connected somehow with his father’s perfidy, force Mrs. Alving to confront her own ghosts.