Not even the world’s most slavish Ibsen junkie will ever be able to fully appreciate the impact Ghosts had upon its London debut in 1891. ‘A dirty act done publicly’ thundered an infamous Telegraph review, genuinely horrified by the Norwegian dramatist’s dabblings with STIs, incest, adultery, euthanasia and a lil’ bit of good old blasphemy.
Still, even if your jaw no longer drops that it would ‘go there’, Ghosts has hardly lost its edge: STIs, incest, adultery, euthanasia and blasphemy haven’t become twee. And I’d say playwright Gary Owen has bitten off a bit more than he can chew in trying to aggressively modernise a play that is, at heart, extremely modern.
Following in the footsteps of his excellent Iphigenia in Splott and Romeo and Julie, Ghosts is his third radical update of a major classical tragedy in collaboration with Lyric Hammersmith boss Rachel O’Riordan (presumably nobody could think of a cute new name for this one).
But although it’s a solid production with an excellent cast, it feels like Owen has ripped out some of its character in an effort to logically set it in the present.
Helena (Victoria Smurfit, fresh from her caged tiger turn in Rivals) is a widow who has used her late husband Captain Alving’s vast fortune to fund the creation of a children’s hospital on the unspecified English island the play is set on. But a series of dark truths about the deceased are set to come to light and shatter the measure of happiness Helen and her actor son Oz (Callum Scott Howells) have found in the wake of Alving’s death.
You can’t modernise a play by turning it into Oedipus Rex
It’s a very similar set up to Ibsen, and both versions of Ghosts are essentially about the legacy of Captain Alving’s abuse. Owen’s living characters are all more sympathetic, though, and the language they use to discuss their past trauma is very different. There is tension in the opening scene between Helen and her business partner and former lover Andersen (Rhashan Stone). But it largely dissipates when she talks through the horror of her relationship with her late husband and her reasons for not leaving him. She does so in very contemporary terms that agonisingly flesh out her motives and while it changes the character of the play somewhat, it’s Owen’s most effective update. Ibsen was a genius but he was also a dour Victorian Norwegian: the articulate language around coercion and control deployed here simply didn’t exist in his day.
What I found harder to accept was Owen cutting the syphilis and religion stuff. I mean I get it. But the problem is that to compensate he’s gone all in on the incest. Which is handled relatively subtly in Ibsen, but Owen has virtually made it the main plot driver, vastly expanding the complicated relationship between Oz and local girl Reggie (Patricia Allison), whose parentage is not what she believes. It’s a choice that makes a certain sense but it throws the play off balance. Ibsen wrote a drama about a family being overwhelmed by a multitude of disasters that all originate from the dead Captain. But Owen makes Oz and Reggie’s relationship the load bearer of the story and I’m not convinced. You can’t modernise a play by turning it into Oedipus Rex.
To be clear, Owen has hardly defaced Ibsen, he’s just fiddled with the plot in a way that might slightly annoy boring people who can’t see beyond their knowledge of the original story (hi!). He has undeniably added a layer of emotional articulacy that allows for a much deeper discussion of abuse than Ibsen ever offered. O’Riordan has assembled a great cast. Merle Hensel’s set looks great - a chicly minimalist living room with a huge glass wall; outside it fog billows furiously, and characters who walk out in it really do look like ghosts.
It’s a decent play, but too often it feels like an exercise in trying to transpose the original to the present, and certainly it lacks the burning conviction that made Iphigenia in Splott a modern classic.
