Ghosts stuck in a timewarp

The play’s eventual appearance on the stage prompted reviewers to reach for their sharpest terms of opprobrium: "revoltingly suggestive", "nasty-minded", "as foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards".

Now the fuss is difficult to comprehend, notwithstanding Ibsen’s use of syphilis as a metaphor for social decay, and in Iain Glen’s directorial debut the layered symbolism and morbid comedy of the Norwegian’s writing feel remote.

The main character, Helene Alving, is planning the dedication of an orphanage built in her late husband’s honour. But she is a slave: to the memory of her faithless spouse, the urgings of her adviser Pastor Manders, and the troubled excitability of her painter son, Oswald.

Ibsen’s concerns are disease, deception, the different motives for loyalty and the past’s toxic bequests but Frank McGuinness’s translation lacks density.

Lesley Sharp impresses as Mrs Alving — first playful then weary. While her hands flutter and her diction remains glacially precise, it’s her chin that is the key to her moods — its angle, strikingly, a gauge of her true feelings. 

Playing Manders, Glen seems overstretched. His accent strays, his beard makes him look like a Lego version of an Amish preacher and, more importantly, he prowls and preens without achieving real gravitas. In the smaller roles there is exquisitely uncomfortable work from Harry Treadaway, as Oswald, and Jessica Raine, while Stephen Brimson Lewis’s pillared marble design is polished.

Yet the production is insufficiently dynamic, and it doesn’t live up to the title’s promise of haunting theatre. In the end it’s worthy, but not incendiary.
Until 15 May. Information: 0844 579 1940. 

Ghosts
Duchess Theatre
Catherine Street, WC2B 5LA