Prodigal son Osvald Alving returns to his parents’ house, carrying an “infection”, a phantasmagoria-breeding disease. He faces the gathering darkness of a set of “dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs”, “ghosts” that poison the present and compromise the future. Confined to a dark place which no one can enter or leave, the characters of Espectros [Ghosts] (1881), by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, live “afraid of the light”, dissatisfied with the asphyxiation of their affective lives. They thirst for a vital impetus that will free them from an existence ruled by conservatism and the omnipresence of money. “With Ibsen”, wrote George Steiner, “the history of drama begins anew. This alone makes of him the most important playwright after Shakespeare and Racine”. Stage director Nuno Cardoso includes him for the first time in the repertoire of this National Theatre, a noteworthy gesture. “What do we inherit?”, asks Helene Alving, Osvald’s mother. We inherit a force from the past, so strong and persistent that it continues to resound through our “few and evil” days.