Review: Ghosts, Lyric Hammersmith

It’s tricky taking on the classics at the best of times. All that weight of expectation, with many in the audience remembering previous productions and making comparisons to supposedly definitive renditions…

Does an adaptation lessen or heighten such vulnerabilities? This updated Ghosts, by Gary Owen, brings Ibsen’s 1881 original into the modern era complete with a raft of current sensibilities and preoccupations. In his programme note, Owen writes that he hopes to “reproduce the impact this dusty old classic had when it was a snarling, swaggering young play”, while director Rachel O’Riordan asserts that the question of the play remains “can we escape the shadows of our parents and predecessors?”.

The plot concerns wealthy widow Helena (Victoria Smurfit), who is using a substantial chunk of her late husband’s fortune to found a children’s hospital (an orphanage in the original). Her son Oz (Callum Scott Howells) is home from his adventures as an actor (formerly, an artist) and growing closer to his old nanny’s daughter Reggie (Patricia Allison) who works for Helena. A lawyer, Andersen (Rhashan Stone) and Reggie’s tradesman father Jacob (Deka Walmsley) complete the cast. Their interactions are played out on a cold, minimalist set with swirling mist visible outside through a clear rear wall.

The play feels authentically faithful to Ibsen’s original: the themes are big and morally engaging, the characters suitably impactful and tied tightly to their narrative purposes. Ghosts caused outrage on first publication, and had its first production in Canada when it’s themes of infidelity, incest and sexually transmitted disease proved too much for European theatres. Of that trio, only incest remains shocking today, so that becomes the dramatic focus of this production, with STDs written out and the shame of infidelity replaced with issues around consent.

A bizarrely squeamish press night audience certainly seemed horrified when Oz and Reggie first became intimate (they’re revealed to be half-siblings) – I was surprised to hear such an audible burst of disgust and acutely nervous laughter. But this may be partly because, from the outset, both Owen’s script and O’Riordan’s direction tend towards extremes and showing us the action through a larger-than-life lens. Helena’s entitlement, Jacob’s working-class roots and Oz’s luvvie affectations are all played first and foremost for laughs, so it’s perhaps difficult to know how to connect with the play’s serious subject matter.

The cast all work intensely hard and with great dedication, and the remodelled storyline is absolutely appropriate to the days we’re living in now.  A prolonged scene about consent and when it can be withdrawn feels very timely, as does a debate between Helena and Andersen about the morality of naming the new hospital after a man whose toxicity may be about to get him posthumously “cancelled”. The players give their all to these entirely relevant themes, but there’s just something about the way in which they’re presented that prevents them from quite landing with the required conviction. It’s not the updating of the plot and language – I doubt Ibsen originally had Oz describe himself as a “sister-fucking degenerate” – that keeps this Ghosts from attaining a genuinely haunting dramatic pitch. It’s the decision to approach the modernised story with such broad brushstrokes that brings it down to Earth.

Writer: Gary Owen
Director: Rachel O’Riordan

Ghosts plays at the Lyric, Hammersmith until May 10th.