Lesley Sharp, Iain Glen, Harry Treadaway, Jessica Raine and Malcolm Storry unite in Frank McGuinness’ version of Henrik Ibsen’s gripping, classic tale of hope in the face of infidelity and deceit.
Controversy and hidden pasts are suddenly and painfully exposed as wealthy widow Mrs Alving prepares to open a new orphanage in memory of her seemingly beloved husband. Her treasured son Oswald’s return from Paris and her relationship with old friend Pastor Manders are no longer the source of joy they once were, as secrets are turned into a frightening and desperate reality.
LIMITED SEASON 11 FEBRUARY TO 15 MAY
THE TIMES Benedict Nightingale ****
When the Telegraph critic greeted Ghosts in the London of 1891 by dismissing it as “a deplorable, loathsome history”, he was mainly offended by the mention of the inherited syphilis that is eating away poor Oswald Alving’s brain. But last night it seemed that Ibsen was being contentious in a new, topical way. How forcefully Harry Treadaway’s Oswald was warning his mother he’d soon become “filthy, filthy, year after year, a ghost of a man”, how fiercely he was begging her to end his vegetable life. The shadow of Dignitas had fallen over Stephen Brimson Lewis’s unusually airy, ironically bright Scandinavian living room.
Nor was that all that seemed timely in a play that was still successfully banging across timeless ideas: the need for spiritual and mental freedom, but the power of the past, the difficulty of exorcising whatever “ghosts” inhibit our lives. Switch on the box in America, or sometimes even in England, and there’s Iain Glen’s Pastor Manders, his vowels melodically swooping and soaring as he pitches into (say) Oswald’s belief in love outside marriage. The shadow of oppressive fundamentalism also falls powerfully over a production that is, as it happens, by Glen himself.
Not that director Glen lets actor Glen embody only the scary televangelist. True, his Manders works himself into a fit of righteous rage when he’s calling Lesley Sharp’s Mrs Alving a sinner and telling her “there’s guilt in your soul”, all because she supposedly wasn’t obedient enough to the roué husband who impregnated her servant and fatally infected her son.
There are delicate touches here too: a complacency and conceit reflected in his looming, preening body-language, a sexual susceptibility suggested by his comical interest in the servant Regina’s young flesh, a hint of vulnerability beneath the scary certainty. This is a fine performance, subtle yet charismatic, one that simultaneously shows the preacher’s power and his weakness. And there’s strong support: from Malcolm Storry as the sleazy hypocrite who dupes Manders; from Sharp as a Mrs Alving rapturously besotted with her boy and quiet yet firm in her defence of his freethinking; and from Treadaway as an Oswald whose mind as well as his clothes might have been dragged through the jungle.
I’ve seen some good Ghosts in my time, but none better than this.
