Unusual haunts
Ghosts
Old Fire Station, 30 May - 3 June
When Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was first performed in London it was called “an open drain”, “a loathsome sore unbandaged”, and “a dirty act done publicly”. It was banned from public performance in England for thirty years. At a banquet in Ibsen’s honour at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, King Oscar II played theatre critic and declared that Ghosts was not a good play, and should never have been written.
Good or not, Ghosts is certainly one of the most controversial and challenging of Ibsen’s dramas, with a storyline which fearlessly unleashes a torrent of Victorian unmentionables: illegitimate children, infidelity and incest, not to mention euthanasia and venereal diseases. Mrs Alving (Jennifer Pick) is opening an orphanage in memory of her dead husband, not to commemorate him but to conceal the awful truth that despite his public reputation he was an immoral, cheating scoundrel.
Her son, Oswald (Paul Russell) has returned home from Paris after twenty years, suffering from syphilis and planning to marry Mrs Alving’s maid, Regine (Chanya Button) — who turns out to be his father’s illegitimate daughter. To top if off, the conservative Pastor Manders (Frank Brinkley) comes into conflict with Mrs Alving as she struggles towards self-realisation, attempting to free herself of her husband’s spectral presence.
Ibsen told King Oscar that he wrote Ghosts because he had to, and despite the darkness of the subject matter, audiences at the OFS will be very thankful that he did. Ibsen’s script remains as powerful, dynamic and contemporary as ever. Ben Bransfield directs against the grain of the play by choosing to foreground Mrs Alving’s inner torment over Oswald’s breakdown as he succumbs to syphilis.
Fortunately he has found in Pick an actress absolutely capable of sustaining the tormented tone of Ibsen’s writing. However, Bransfield’s stroke of genius is to move the action of the play from the end of the nineteenthcentury to 1970s England, finding an analogue in its industrial and emotional turbulence for Ibsen’s confined and confining worldview. While the change might initially seem arbitrary, the skill with which the shift is woven into the play quickly eases any doubts.
The use of sudden blackouts (reflecting the rolling powercuts prevalent during the era of the three-day week) gives Bransfield a striking way of punctuating the violent arguments which make up much of the script. Every actor in the show seems to have found the emotional centre of their character, ensuring that the occasionally stilted dialogue never comes off sounding unreal.
The relationship between Pick and Russell is particularly convincing, the two actors conveying the varied tensions, fears and jealousies which inflect every mother-son relationship, while they never allow the extremity of their characters’ situations (how many mothers have to urge their sons not to marry their half-sisters?) to verge into melodrama. Overall, it is a powerful and impressive play, which perfectly marries confident and expressive direction with accomplished character acting.
25th May 2006