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The Spirit of a Thought in a Fictional World: 
Summoning Ghosts to the Stage

Ruth Weller-Passman, Ball State University

Works of art are inherently spectral in that they are fictional representations of life and reality, 
particularly theatre, which brings a nonexistent world to life by creating layers of performance 
between audience and actors, and even the characters of the play. Through a close reading of 
both the text and performance of Henrik Ibsen’s tragedy Ghosts, this paper explores the rela-
tionship between theatre and hauntings, unpacking the layers of spectrality of stage props and 
the employment of silence onstage.

“Theatre, in all of its aspects, uniquely insists on the reality of ghosts,” claims Alice 
Rayner (Introduction). Though ghosts defy definition and encompass a diverse range of 
beings and concepts, most share one feature: having a foot in each of two worlds, a liminal 
existence that hovers between opposites and which is sometimes referred to as “spectral.” 
Theatre operates in a similar threshold between past and present, reality and illusion, literal-
ism and symbolism. Visual arts such as paintings and sculptures lack the immediacy of live 
creation that theatre relies upon, and other performance arts such as dance lack the concrete 
narrative that plays provide. No other art form summons such a tactile, animate story on 
command. This world is self-contained by the so-called fourth wall that separates audiences 
from actors. Yet this fourth wall is easily perforated, as theatre provides a uniquely acces-
sible and relatable experience by using human performers as its canvas—it seems to invite 
audience members to imagine themselves in the place of the characters. These few juxtapo-
sitions are just the tip of the iceberg and provide a basic justification for further inquiry into 
the relationship between theatre and ghosts. 

Entire books have been devoted to this subject, so this essay will be focusing on two spe-
cific facets of theatre that can be probed for spectrality. One is the employment of props: the 
way that objects—in and of themselves—embody a tactile link between past and present, 
and the additional ghostliness that objects take on when they are used in theatrical produc-
tions. The second is the unique immediacy of silence onstage. It is utterly unlike silence in 
cinema, as it is live and present and instantly engages the audience with the performance in 
a new and spectral manner by demanding that the audience play an active role in determin-
ing the meaning and weight of the silence. These two subjects are ideal for a brief but thor-
ough examination of theatre’s relationship with ghosts and hauntings, in part because they 
are easily recognizable to anyone who has ever attended a theatrical event. Little technical 
knowledge of the theatre’s inner workings is necessary for a cursory understanding of props 
and dramatic pauses onstage. In addition, these two themes dovetail nicely with each other, 
because they both rely upon audience engagement to form meaning and symbolism within 
the story of a play. The focus of this paper is the spectrality in an audience’s unique interac-

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89Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman

tions with theatrical performances. These two themes, props and silence, provide a familiar 
foothold to facilitate an in-depth and accessible analysis of this broad and abstract concept. 

In order to ground this conceptual discussion in a concrete theatrical example, the aptly 
named play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen will be used as a lens through which to explore the 
themes of this paper. Though it has been speculated that all plays could bear this title due 
to their repetition and reliance upon memory, Ibsen’s plays in particular deal with the past’s 
intrusion upon the present and the return of people and memories thought dead (Carlson 
1). There is no better example of these themes than Ghosts itself. The characters of Ibsen’s 
piece are not haunted by corporeal apparitions in their attic; no actor is employed to portray 
the role of the protagonist’s deceased husband. Instead, these are ghosts of lies, suppressed 
desires, and even concepts such as duty. Actors cast in	Ghosts must summon to life that 
which never lived in the first place: the spirit of a thought within a fictional world. Addi-
tionally, it is partly through the use of props and carefully timed silences that this theatrical 
sleight of hand is accomplished. 

Before considering the spectrality of a specific prop in Ghosts, the question must first be 
posed: what makes any object ghostly? Objects are, after all, inanimate—lifeless and de-
void of meaning in and of themselves. Yet, as Alice Rayner points out, objects often become 
extensions of the humans who use them (Chapter three). There is nothing intrinsically alive 
or meaningful about a cane, for example. Yet when it is employed to help a person walk, 
it takes on the role of a third limb for that individual—a phantom limb of sorts. Does that 
association not breathe life into that inanimate cane in some way, granting it a spectrality 
that a cane tucked away in an attic cannot possess? Consider, too, the way that possessions 
inherited from a deceased relative take on significance that would mean nothing to a strang-
er. Not only are these objects’ sentimental values disconnected from their intended uses, 
but they seem infused with the presence and very life of their original owners. Spectral and 
liminal, these objects hover somewhere between their practical everyday function and their 
newly-endowed spiritual symbolism.

A prop that is employed early in Ghosts will provide an ideal starting place to discuss the 
ghostliness of props. The play begins with the protagonist, Mrs. Alving, entertaining old friend 
and religious authority Pastor Manders. Her son, Oswald, has recently returned home to take a 
break from his career as an artist. While Pastor Manders and Mrs. Alving are talking, Oswald 
appears in the doorway smoking a pipe. The following conversation takes place: 

OSWALD. I found my father’s pipe in my room—
MANDERS. Aha—then that accounts for it!
MRS. ALVING. For what?
MANDERS. When Oswald appeared there, in the doorway, with the pipe 
in his mouth, I could have sworn I saw his father, large as life.
OSWALD. No, really?
MRS. ALVING. Oh, how can you say so? Oswald takes after me.
MANDERS. Yes, but there is an expression about the corners of the 
mouth, something about the lips—that reminds one exactly of Alving: at 
any rate, now that he is smoking. (Ghosts Act 1)

The pipe that belonged to Oswald’s father, then, has a double meaning for the characters 



90

within the narrative. The pipe is nothing more than a pipe; there is nothing particularly 
special or interesting about it. But because of its place in the Alving family history, it is 
able to evoke the memory of Mrs. Alving’s husband so completely that Manders actually 
mistakes the son for the father. The pipe is also a tactile remnant of a lost family member. It 
is inscribed with the spiritual memory of its owner, yet it also has a physical presence (both 
within the world of the play and within the performance). It, like a ghost, hovers between 
the physical and the spiritual world, unable to singularly inhabit either. 

The pipe takes on further spectrality when the subtext of the above excerpt is layered 
into the performance. Mr. Alving had a reputation as a noble man, but that reputation was a 
fabrication invented by his wife, in part to protect her son from the knowledge of what his 
father really was. The Mr. Alving that Oswald and Pastor Manders envision is incongruent 
with the Mr. Alving that Mrs. Alving knew.  No wonder Mrs. Alving protests at the assertion 
that Oswald looks like his father—she has spent her whole life trying to ensure that Oswald 
grows up to be nothing like him. Later in the play she specifically mentions to Manders that 
she “was determined that Oswald, my own boy, should inherit nothing whatever from his fa-
ther….My son shall have everything from me—everything” (Ghosts Act 1). Even something 
as innocuous as a pipe becomes laden with meaning. For Manders and Oswald, it is a remnant 
of an upstanding and noble father figure. For Mrs. Alving, it is a reminder of the lies she has 
told and the sacrifices she has made to protect her son from his own father. 

But before the pipe can even make its appearance onstage, it must occupy a peculiar 
stopping place: the props table, organized carefully backstage so that each performer and 
crew member knows just where to locate each critical prop night after night. “Especially 
when they are simply sitting backstage or in the prop room prior to their uses in a perfor-
mance, bereft of both text and performance, prop objects can seem suspended between 
both worldly and fictional uses,” says Rayner (Chapter three). In terms of the narrative, the 
props are indeed suspended between use and neglect, between reality and fiction. But for 
the performers that will bring the story to life, the props can be infused with a further level 
of spectral meaning available only to those who might have worked with this particular 
theatre company before. Most theatres maintain collections of props that they can pull from 
for multiple productions. Since actors often return to the same theatres again and again to 
participate in productions, their relationship with props that have been reused can be as 
complicated and multifaceted as a character’s relationship with an object within a play. The 
actor who will portray Oswald in a production of Ghosts, for example, may have been in 
an earlier production of a stage adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. The pipe that he will soon 
clamp between his teeth may once have played a role in the story of that famous detective. 
Indeed, the pipe may have collected stories and meanings from dozens of actors, designers, 
and directors over the years. “While objects are mastered by (and master) actors in perfor-
mance, they also function as secret talismans in systems of superstition and familial inheri-
tance on and off the stage,” notes Aoife Monks (150).

Therefore, when an actor steps onstage as Oswald with his pipe in a production of 
Ghosts, he is accompanied by myriad symbols and meanings. The pipe may contain count-
less stories from other productions, the ghosts of which will follow the actor onstage into 
an entirely new story, past invading present, memory invading immediacy. Within this new 
world that he and his prop currently inhabit, the pipe carries the added weight of the dead 
father his character never knew. It also carries the ghosts of his mother’s lies and omissions 
of truth, embodying her memory of who Mr. Alving truly was and the way that she has 
erased that truth from her son’s life. 

Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman



91

Yet we have so far failed to discuss one group of people who have the power to assign 
meaning to props (or any part of a production): the audience itself. As is the case when view-
ing any piece of art, every individual’s interpretation will be unique and specific, influenced 
by a host of personal factors that the artist has no control over. But in this case, the audience 
is in a unique position: viewers have the power to affect the art they are viewing directly. 
In many ways, the audience is just as responsible for the creation and meaning of the per-
formance as the actors, director, and designers. Erica Fischer-Lichte describes this effect as 
“atmosphere”—something that cannot be summoned by the presence of any single element 
on or offstage, but arises from the unique interactions of many individual factors, such as the 
interaction between the audience and the performers (70-71). And the actors are engaged in an 
incredible sleight of hand as they actively reveal secrets about their character to the audience 
that the character is not even aware of yet, implicating the audience in unraveling the meaning 
behind the dialogue before the story itself does (Whitaker 711). Because of the immediacy of 
live performance, the audience’s interaction with the narrative plays as important a role as any 
of the performers. Few conditions can affect a production more than the condition of an audi-
ence: a restless audience can alter the energy in the performance space so dramatically that it 
may utterly transform the tone of that night’s show. The quality of a performance often hinges 
on the willingness of an audience to laugh at appropriate moments or maintain silence during 
others. As Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow claim:

Theatre…is potentially a living communion based on the bonds of sympathy, a kind 
of direct magnetic sensing, a ‘being with’ other beings and other modes of being. A 
‘dead’ audience receives information and, perhaps, changes its ideas; a ‘live’ audience 
potentially transmutes being and consciousness—not merely the content or objects of 
consciousness (59). 

For example, a dead audience might not engage with the multitude of questions that the 
pipe raises or the layers of meaning it holds for every person on and offstage. Although not 
everyone has performed in a stage play, almost all of us can relate to the sinking feeling of 
addressing a crowd that is disengaged from the subject at hand, and how difficult it is to 
keep that uncomfortable knowledge from impacting your performance. While the perfor-
mance might not be utterly derailed, the actors in a production of Ghosts would almost 
certainly recognize the symptoms of a disengaged audience, and they might struggle to give 
a performance identical to one in which the audience is actively taking part in the creation 
of meaning in the play.  

Silence is a key barometer for judging how engaged an audience is with a story being 
portrayed onstage. Silence is one of the very building blocks of theatre: without it, the audi-
ence would be chattering over the actors’ lines. In a way, the audience is spectralizing itself 
for the purposes of the production, silencing its own voice to allow the world of the play 
to overtake it. This peculiar unspoken agreement between cast and audience can be broken 
with something as simple as a poorly timed sneeze during a crucial moment in the play. Yet 
the play goes on, only momentarily wrenched out of the moment. For a moment, the illu-
sion hovers on the cusp of actualization as the audience reconnects with the story and once 
again willingly forgets that it is an audience and not a part of the play’s world. In cinema, 
too, the audience is expected to break the silence only when appropriate, such as after laugh 
lines. But there is also a clear difference in the natures of these two silences: in cinema, an 
inappropriate breach of silence is disruptive only to the audience. In theatre, it is 

Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman



92

disruptive to the performance as well. In no other art form can the audience so immediately 
and so effectively engage with a concrete narrative as it is created before their eyes. Though 
the audience is not present in the world of the play, its ability to affect the story promotes 
it to an active player in the way that the story is told. The audience as at once present and 
absent in the narrative. Malekin and Yarrow explain, “Theatre is a communal event…both 
performers and receivers are affected; both individual and shared experience occurs; what 
occurs involves at least a crossing of borders—borders between self and other, life and 
death, between ‘reality’ (itself largely imagined) and imagination, the entry into different 
parameters of existence” (62). 

To reverse the perspective for a moment, this breakdown of borders is just as crucial to 
the actors as it is to the audience. As in the case of an audience unwilling to participate in 
developing the layers of meaning of the pipe, the actors rely on an audience’s engagement 
with their narrative, even as they must deny this reliance for the purposes of maintaining the 
conceptual fourth wall. They feed off the audience’s reactions, however microscopic, even 
though according to the narrative they are telling, the audience does not exist (and in most 
cases, must not exist for the purposes of storytelling). The performers hover somewhere 
between acknowledging and ignoring the audience’s presence—putting the audience in a 
spectral and liminal position of half-existence within the story. 

One of the ways that this peculiar relationship between audience and actor is felt is 
when an actor takes a pause onstage. Silences in cinema exist in an utterly different world, 
because they are timed to the millisecond and tell the same story every time. Though it is 
obviously up to each audience member to determine the meaning of the pause, any single 
interpretation is not going to influence the tone of the film or the length of the silence. In 
theatre, however, the silence is immediate. The actors onstage are responsible for recreating 
a specific moment of silence at every performance, though of course that silence will never 
exist precisely the same way twice. Even if the actor were capable of perfectly recreating 
an exactly timed pause, the audience’s interpretation and interaction with the performance 
would render the silence utterly different each night. Speaking of the immediacy of space 
in the theatre, Malekin and Yarrow note, “I cannot enter this space if I am walled off in 
habit or in ego. Performers need to cross these boundaries, to interact and interfuse, to be 
open and available to each other and to the audience. I have to flow. I have to lose ‘myself’” 
(60). The myriad of meanings that the audience members assign to every pause influences 
the way they watch the play, which affects the energy between the stage and the audience, 
which can affect the length, tone, and intensity of the pause. And this creation of meaning 
can be achieved not only with dialogue, but also with silence—not the presence of spoken 
words, but the absence of them. Yet that absence has a tangible presence of its own as it 
draws the audience in and engages them with a fictional world that they do not inhabit. 

Once again, the world of Ibsen’s Ghosts provides an ideal jumping-off place for dis-
cussing the spectrality of theatrical silence. Whether they are pauses written into the stage 
directions or characters deliberately omitting some portion of the truth, the silences in 
Ghosts are just as important as the dialogue and sometimes even more so. Aristotle posited 
that attending a play is an act of catharsis. The audience members are not only escaping the 
reality of their own lives but vicariously experiencing a fictional character’s problems and 
thus feeling more capable of handling their own. Theatre is meant to help make sense of a 
chaotic world (Pizatto 176-177). But Ibsen was not in the business of comforting his audi-
ences by providing them with easy answers. Instead, his plays posed questions. His aim was 
to stage something closer to real life, where answers are not as clear-cut as they often are in 

Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman



93

the stories we tell (Durbach 124). This withholding of answers is reflected not only in the 
ambiguous conclusions that Ibsen’s plays are known for, but in the subtext-laden dialogue 
that often layers more meaning into what isn’t said than into what is. 

Take, for instance, the following exchange in act two. Oswald has just revealed to Mrs. 
Alving that he is suffering from syphilis. His doctor has informed him that this disease 
is generally inherited from a licentious parent, but since Oswald is still submersed in the 
illusion of his father’s morality—the illusion that Mrs. Alving herself has instilled in his 
mind—he has come to believe that he somehow brought this disease upon himself.  

OSWALD. …If it had only been something inherited—something one 
wasn’t responsible for! But this! To have thrown away so shamefully, 
thoughtlessly, recklessly, one’s own happiness, one’s own health, every-
thing in the world—one’s future, one’s very life—!

MRS. ALVING. No, no, my dear, darling boy; this is impossible! [Bends 
over him.] Things are not so desperate as you think. (Ghosts Act 2)

Here again, the “ghosts” of the narrative exist in the truths that each character is trying 
to subvert. The audience is aware by now of Mrs. Alving’s secret (the true nature of her 
departed husband) and so the subtext in her dialogue is distinct and immediately recogniz-
able. Oswald is almost begging for Mrs. Alving to reveal the truth to him, yet Mrs. Alving 
is still dancing around the truth. She could alleviate his fears with a few words, but she still 
opts for mollifying platitudes that only hint at the truth. As in the case of the dual meaning 
of the pipe, the two versions of Mr. Alving that exist in the characters’ minds—the saintly 
father and the degenerate husband—seem to hover over the text, ghosts in their own right. 
But there is another unspoken truth beginning to insert itself into the narrative. Later in the 
script, Oswald will reveal that his disease will eventually rob him of his mental acuity, leav-
ing him with the intellect of an infant. The prospect of losing his mind so terrifies Oswald 
that he will eventually extract a dangerous promise from his mother: that when the time 
comes, she will help him take his own life rather than living out the rest of his days with 
the mind of an infant. Long before the disease itself is acknowledged onstage, the audience 
should feel the presence of something haunting that hides between the lines of Oswald’s 
dialogue—just as it should sense the contradiction between different characters’ perceptions 
of the late Mr. Alving long before Mrs. Alving verbally acknowledges the untruths she has 
spread about him. This urgent, desperate terror that Oswald refers to as “this killing dread” 
(Ghosts Act 3) is a specter that follows him onstage at his very first entrance and never 
leaves his side. It should also be noted that though it represents one of the major conflicts of 
the play, the word syphilis is never used in the dialogue—an intentional omission indicative 
of the way that Ibsen layers his silences with meaning (Vardoulakis 52).

Beyond the subtext, there are also silences written into Ibsen’s script. There is, of course, 
a great scope for silences to be added in by directors and actors; but when a pause is literal-
ly written into the text of a play, it cannot be deviated from because it is just as significant 
as any line of dialogue. Consider the following excerpt (which takes place just before Mrs. 
Alving reveals the truth about her husband to Pastor Manders):

MANDERS. …verily, Mrs. Alving, you are a guilt-laden mother! This I 
have thought it my duty to say to you. 

Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman



94

[Silence.]

MRS. ALVING. [Slowly and with self-control] You have now spoken out, 
Pastor Manders; and to-morrow you are to speak publicly in memory of 
my husband. I shall not speak to-morrow. But now I will speak frankly to 
you, as you have spoken to me. (Ghosts Act 1) 

Imagine these lines being spoken without observing the bracketed stage directions. Imagine 
depriving the audience of the opportunity to engage with that haunting silence. By now it is 
obvious that Mrs. Alving has been keeping secrets from the pastor, and during the silence 
the audience is grappling with the same question as Mrs. Alving: is this the moment she will 
reveal her great secret? Without the pause, this moment would seem flat and predictable 
because it would seem that Mrs. Alving had already made up her mind to tell Manders, and 
the audience might disengage from the tension of the scene altogether. This silence is also 
indicative of another specter that haunts all the characters of the play: the specter of duty. 
No matter what each character resorts to in the name of personal freedom (such as Oswald 
pursuing a career in the arts or Mrs. Alving taking her son’s upbringing into her own hands), 
they cannot escape the haunting of society’s expectations and restrictions (Tabasum and 
Khalid 4). Therefore, the silences and subtext become as necessary as Oswald’s pipe in act 
one; without them, the story could not be effectively told. 

Silences, like props, are methods of inviting audiences to engage with a performance and 
take part in ascribing meaning to its story. Both allow audiences’ interpretations and layers 
of meaning to interact with actors’ (and characters’) in the immediacy of a live performance. 
Without the pacing of a silence, the story might as well be told in the form of a novel; without 
the immediacy of the silence onstage and its unique ability to engage with the live audience, 
the story could be told through the medium of film. It is this in-the-moment engagement 
between audience, actors, and characters that makes theatre so spectral. Similarly, without a 
physical pipe in Oswald’s hand, the audience might spend more effort on imagining a nonex-
istent object than it would on unpacking the symbolism of the object itself. 

The audience (which cannot be acknowledged by the characters within the play) is 
actively participating in the storytelling by interpreting symbols such as pipes and pauses. 
They themselves are ghosts that intrude upon the insulated world of the story, yet their 
presence and engagement with the narrative is crucial to the very telling of that story. “Even 
the theater’s most ‘realistic’ images are shared illusions,” Thomas Whitaker points out 
(701). And those illusions cannot exist without the participation of the spectators. The actors 
could be putting on the most riveting performance of their lives, but without an audience 
to imagine those opposing versions of Mr. Alving, his ghosts would exist only in the minds 
of the performers. With it, the ghosts become a dynamic intersection of the imaginations of 
both audience members and actors. Theatre provides a liminal space where fiction is alive 
and real (if only for the span of a single evening’s performance) and the combined efforts of 
spectator and artist can summon a ghost on command. 

Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman



95Spirit of a Thought, Weller-Passman

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