The Stage

Ghosts

Published Wednesday 24 February 2010 at 13:45 by Ben Dowell

There’s plenty for newbie director Iain Glen to grapple with Ibsen’s tangled and absorbing story of family secrets, guilt and the captivating power of religious ideas. And after a fairly under-powered start, this production really gets going to become a nuanced, powerful and generally well-calibrated showpiece.

Harry Treadaway (Oswald Alving) and Lesley Sharp (Mrs Alving) in Ghosts at the Duchess Theatre Photo: Tristram Kenton

But Glen is not helped by Frank McGuinness’ translation, however, which wears its colloquiality a little too obviously. A good translator shouldn’t really let you see the joins all too evident with phrases like “easy as pie”.

But Glen does at least tease out some superb acting from his cast, particularly Lesley Sharp as the tortured matriarch Mrs Alving, who starts the play preparing to erect an orphanage to honour the dead husband she knows to have been a licentious monster. By turns fiercely passionate about her son Oswald, newly arrived for the orphanage’s opening, she is also quietly determined to defend the liberal ideals which her old friend Pastor Manders (Glen) cannot abide.

In fact, at one point Manders holds some of her progressive books between finger and thumb as if they are diseased (a motif that is rather a little too heavily played on throughout the production). But Glen also injects subtlety into his portrayal of the complicated cleric who is vulnerable and needy behind the buttoned up exterior. He seems initially attracted to serving girl Regine but responds to Mrs Alving’s startling account of the secret about her late spouse with little hint that she and he may once have been lovers. When she tries to touch him, he recoils as if it’s never happened (which given the decibels Glen gives to his moralistic ranting may not be surprising).

There is able support from Jessica Raine’s energetic and impassioned Regine, given a voice by learning the truth about herself and from Harry Treadaway as the syphilitic son Oswald who grows to realise the deeper meaning of his disease with affecting precision and power.

Praise too to Stephen Brimson Lewis’ design and Oliver Fenwick’s lighting of an unusually bright Ghosts set which conjures a striking sense of the cold desolation outside - but also within - the far from comfortable living room.