Ghosts (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Ibsen’s Ghosts was written and published in 1881 and did not get a professional production for two years. Bear in mind that his previous play A Doll’s House had made him the most talked-about playwright in Europe and beyond. But Ghosts was considered so revolting, so obscene, so repulsive in its dwelling on the seamier sides of slides that not only would theatres not stage it, even the printed edition was a flop with half the copies being returned from the shop. Like the freethinking pamphlets in Mrs Alving’s sitting room, Ghosts was not something to be seen in a respectable home. In January 1886, years after the play had been published, there was a performance of A Doll’s House at the Meiningen Theatre, Germany, and local students heard that there would be copies of Ghosts available to read and so they sat in the stalls passing the books from hand to hand reading Ghosts while A Doll’s House played on stage. When the play was first performed in London, a Daily Telegraph Editorial infamously described it as:

an open drain; […] a loathsome sore unbandaged; […] a dirty act done publicly; […] a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.

Of course, now Ghosts is a cornerstone of the western dramatic canon, one of the most famous and widely-performed plays in the world. The current run at the Sam Wanaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe is the 15th production worldwide this year.

Classic status can be a prophylactic, coating and surrounding a play and rendering it harmless. Ghosts was intended as an irritant, to get under the skin. It feels like Ibsen was saying ‘you thought A Doll’s House was shocking? You fucking wait’. But it’s hard to retain that sense of shock when we are being handed something that we are told is a classic. Can classics ever really shock? We have the distance of time, the cotton wool bedding of cultural prestige, the cosiness of familiarity.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been teaching my university module on Naturalist Theatre. As you know, in universities we sometimes are encouraged to give content notes on work that we are requiring students to read. I should say, where I teach, we are not required to do this; it is academic judgment whether this is appropriate. I feel in two minds about it: it annoys me when content warnings act as spoilers; sometimes I feel like a focus on potentially triggering contents ignores context (Please note that the musical Oklahoma! contains references to drug use, prostitution, pornography, and sexualised violence - which it does but, really?). On the other hand, content warnings allow students who are dealing with serious traumatic experiences the opportunity to gather resilience to read work effectively. (This is important: content notes are to enable students to read, not to give students the option not to read.) With Naturalism, my ambivalence is particularly strong: (a) it can feel silly to put a content notice on a play as famous as Ghosts; but (b) this play really does deal with some shocking material and not to acknowledge that seems both disrespectful to the students and actually to participate in the neutering of this play.

So I was pleased to see that Shakespeare’s Globe have also given a content notice for this play.

Content Guidance: The play contains themes of incest, euthanasia and references to suicide.

…to which they could also have added ‘sexually transmitted disease, prostitution/sex work, blasphemy, and familial sexual exploitation’. What I was even more pleased about when I watched it last night is that the cluster of young people around me (not my students, but student age I’d say), were audibly shocked and horrified by what they were watching. There were gasps when it became clear that Engstrand was encouraging his daughter into sex work in the Sailors’ Home he was planning; jaws dropped when it became clear that Osvald has become a romantic and perhaps sexual relationship with his half-sister. There were shocked looks exchanged when they realised that Osvald was asking his own mother to end his life. And more.

And they were right. Partly because Ibsen’s play has confrontation and antagonism in its bones. But partly because Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation and production has pushed the play’s challenge to the fore. He’s following the lead of Richard Eyre, whose own adaptation/production at the Almeida ran at 90 minutes straight through. Hill-Gibbins’s is 100 minutes (and the show was advertised at 2hrs20m with an interval so clearly some major surgery has happened recently). But it gives the play’s unfolding horror a great rush of energy. Hill-Gibbins has done his own version which makes the action of the play feel continuous (though I think there are meant to be time jumps) but puts some of the possible subtextual drivers of the characters more to the foreground: Manders appears to perv on Regine early on and throughout and Regine hints that she would like to become his mistress, for instance. Engstrand’s plans for the Sailor’s Home are underlined more forcefully. The incestuous Osvald-Regine relationship is made more confrontationally direct than I’ve seen before.

This version is sort of modernised? Actually that’s not clear to me: it’s kind of modern dress, though the costuming is kind of plausibly clothing that could have been worn in the 1880s and now (Mrs Alving’s velvet dress, Father Manders’s suit, Osvald’s cardigan) which means I’m not sure if it’s set in the present or modern dress but set in the 1880s, or maybe set in. some no-time between now and then. Rosanna Vize’s set is an open shaggy magenta carpet that suggests maybe coastal heather; at the back are full height (10 ft?) mirrors, which double ands ghost the action. The magnificent end of Act 1 of Ibsen’s play has the remembered flirtation with (or assault upon) a female servant repeated in Osvald’s flirtation with Regine; they see it happen in the mirror, as if it’s in the next room or even in their minds. The set is, as always in the Globe spaces, in dialogue with the theatre; the candelabras are part of the motif, being lit by a servant at the beginning and then horribly snuffed out at the end. I wasn’t sure about the set at the beginning but soon came to love it; the cast walked barefoot over that carpet, giving this very indoor space a rougher more open landscape. The louvred mirrors glittered and multiplied the candlelight which itself created pockets of concealment and revelation in this play of secrets revealed.

This is a great cast. Sarah Slimani plays Regine as a woman on the make but also someone with an edge of desperation who will do whatever she needs to survive. Greg Hicks’s Engstrand is an insinuatingly comic figure who implies everything and says nothing. Paul Hilton’s Father Manders is an oily moralist with slippery morals. Stuart Thompson’s Osvald is clear-sighted and clear-headed, until he isn’t, a figure of rage and desperation. And Hattie Morahan as Alving is superb: more youthful and more sensuous than she is usually played, she is our guide through the play, watching aghast as the hidden horrors unfold under her roof. She holds the whole thing together. A decade after she played Nora at the Young Vic, she is now the woman trying to keep the family from falling apart. Her slow realisation that her son is asking her to end his life was devastating to watch.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’s adaptation is sinuous and driving. At moments, I sensed his inexperience as a writer in that the psychological through lines of the characters seemed sometimes broken and discontinuous, the actors having to work too hard to maintain clarity of situation and purpose. But mostly, this is a glorious revival and a blissfully nasty 100 minutes to stay locked in this Lazar house with the doors and windows closed.