On September 19, the Rose Kingston Theatre in Surrey will open its production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “Ghosts,” featuring set designs by none other than Edvard Munch, the Art Newspaper reports. This will be the first time Munch’s designs have been used since the original 1906 production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and coincides with the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth as well as the final season for the theater’s current artistic director Stephen Unwin.

Munch created the work in honor of Ibsen, who died shortly before the Berlin production, and though they had only met on a few occasions after Ibsen had paid the artist a visit, they shared a mutual kinship of inspiration, according to papers in the National Library of Norway. “Ibsen I understand, we had sympathy for each other,” Munch wrote in a letter to his friend, the painterLudvig Ravensburg. “He perhaps felt just as shy and lonely as I did … He felt lonely, abandoned, kicked …”

Set designer Simon Higlett worked closely with biographer Sue Prideaux to recreate Munch’s original vision, referencing 16 large paintings at the Munch Museum in Oslo as well as documents and drawings. Prideaux’s “Behind The Scream” offers her intimate look at Munch’s life, and her theater expertise is evident from her biography of playwright August Strindberg.

Although Munch came from a different artistic tradition from Ibsen, he followed the writer’s stage directions closely and imbued the set with his own style, which the contemporary production is making every effort to maintain. Max Reinhardt, who originally commissioned Munch to design the set, said of the artist’s choice of carpets: “They are the same colour as diseased gums. We must make an effort to find a carpet of that tone. It will put the actors into the right mood!”

— Meredith Caraher

(Image: Detail from Edvard Munch, “Stage Set Design for ‘Ghosts:’ Osvald, pastor Manders and Mrs Alving (Act I, last scene).” 1906. Courtesy the National Library of Norway.)

 

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