Ghosts: Ibsen makes his debut at the Globe with this slick, sulphurous production
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Ibsen’s Ghosts is like sulphurous gas in the lungs – a continuous slow drip of poison in which revelations of syphilis and incest commingle with the ghosts of previous selves and rotten fathers. It’s a good fit for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – a theatre built for secrets and shadows and which has just the right claustrophobic intimacy for a play in which the dead persistently press down on the living. And its great too to see actors of the calibre of Hattie Morahan, Greg Hicks and Paul Hilton, not to mention director and adapter Joe Hill-Gibbins, at Shakespeare’s Globe – a place not usually brilliant at attracting high level talent.
We’re in the house of Helene Alving the night before the grand opening of a children’s home – a monument she has commissioned in the memory of her late husband, who rather than the pillar of community she wants the home to suggest, was actually a philandering alcoholic whose abuses she privately endured throughout a ghastly marriage. With her is her adored son Osvald, an artist back from the bohemian garrets of Paris, and carrying within his blood the fatal legacy of his father’s promiscuity. Few plays are so ripe with symbolism when it comes to children sacrificed on the alter of adult shame.
Hill-Gibbins presents the play in a single take, omitting scene breaks, on a set against whose mirrored back wall those signature Playhouse candles cast their tremulous light. The flickering wicks, the matches used to light them, the lighter Osvald idly toys with – they prefigure perhaps a little too keenly the inferno we know is to come. And the use of that mirrored wall sometimes detracts from the meaning of particular moments – we see, for instance, Osvald and the maid Regine embracing on stage before us in a way that undermines Mrs Alving and Father Manders’ horrified observation, as they catch sight of their reflection in the mirror, that the pair resemble a pair of ghosts.
Yet Hill-Gibbins deftly refreshes the text without us barely realising; we are not in 19th century Norway but instead in some undefined modern day – the only conspicuous note being Stuart Thompson’s touchingly open faced Osvald’s emphatic defence to the fusty Father Manders that families these days come in all shapes and sizes. Ghosts the play cannot escape the past, but this production lives persuasively in the present.
Ghosts is often regarded as Mrs Alving’s play, but it isn’t quite here, or at least, not always. In perhaps the production’s most powerful moment, Sarah Slimani’s superb Regine, on hearing the truth of her parentage, pours champagne contemptuously over her for having condemned her to the life of a maid. Yet while Morahan brings a playful intelligence to Mrs Alving, I missed the sucker punch to the gut Lesley Manville achieved in Richard Eyre’s consummate production a decade ago. And Hilton never fully makes sense of Father Manders – a faintly absurd man of the cloth, who so wants people to regard him as a totem of faith and goodness, perhaps even more than he actually wants to be these things, he allows buildings to go uninsured and for crooks such as Jacob Engstrand (Greg Hicks, wonderful) to persuade him otherwise. Yet those candles come into their own in the final wrenching scene. Not an entirely perfect Ghosts, but a rare success for the Globe.
Until Jan 28. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com
