Productions of Ibsen’s 1881 play are either sublime or awful: this one, adapted and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, is very, very good indeed. Hattie Morahan leads a fine cast and brings her flair for tamped-down, volcanic emotion to the part of Helene Alving, trying to control the damage her terrible sea-captain husband wreaked on her and his offspring.
The action is condensed into 100 atmospheric minutes, though the candle lighting of this venue proves a slightly-too-obvious expression of the play’s metaphors of light and darkness. The red fur coating the set apparently represents the diseased mind of Helene’s son Osvald, who remains onstage whether he’s in a scene or not, a symbolic victim of the twin vices of moral corruption and bourgeois repression. The fur also adds to the mood of thwarted sensuality as characters wrestle on it or pad barefoot across it.
The reason you never get a mediocre staging of Ghosts is that it’s simply too extreme. The five characters are locked on relentlessly tragic courses. Often their fate is obvious – sex work, accidental incest, syphilitic brain decay – but coyly expressed. Hill-Gibbins makes the language plainer and introduces some neat touches. Osvald, the wannabe bohemian artist, calls Helene “mummy”. The clergyman Pastor Manders here becomes “Father” Manders, signaling his part in the patriarchal legacy of hurt: Helene loved him but he forced her to go back to her alcoholic, goatish husband.
Paul Hilton plays Manders as a man too vain and feckless to realise how badly he’s soiled his calling. Through him, Hill-Gibbins also allows us to laugh at Ibsen’s thundering fatalism: Manders only has to mention an uninsured children’s home for us to realise it will burn down within hours. Greg Hicks, another utterly dependable actor, brings a measure of dignity, or at least honest villainy, to the drunken carpenter Engstrand, who married the servant pregnant with Captain Alving’s child for a financial consideration.
His “daughter” Regine is now a maid in Helene’s household and dangerously prey to her half-brother Osvald’s attentions. Sarah Slimani and Stuart Thompson are excellent in the younger roles: she masking fury with deference, he touchingly adrift. Hill-Gibbins brings out the class tensions as well as the more obvious psychodramas here. “I could have been a Captain’s daughter,” hisses Regine, as she pours champagne over Helene.
Morahan hasn’t been on stage often enough since she won an Evening Standard Award for playing Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 2012, but she’s devastating here. She has the alertness of a small raptor surrounded by big, carnivorous beasts. Anger and love seem to erupt out of her in a way that makes most actors’ emoting look contrived. She’s part of a production that makes Ghosts feel poignant and fresh rather than absurd, and that’s no mean feat.
