Christopher Walker reviews Ghosts at the Lyric Hammersmith
It takes a lot to shock a modern audience, generating gasps of horror interspersed with laughter. Gary Owen’s updating of Ibsen’s Ghosts achieves just this.
Ibsen believed the most important events in a play should happen before it begins, the drama concerning itself with characters’ reactions to it. Ghosts fit this bill perfectly.
Wealthy widow Helena is giving most of her money away to build a children’s hospital dedicated to her late husband, Carl. He never appears as a character, but he certainly haunts the play.
A fact cleverly captured by set designer Merle Hensel. The wallpaper of Helena’s chic salon has his image, or at least the back of his head, endlessly repeated.
It is soon clear that Carl’s legacy is a troubled one, not least the fact that the maid Reggie (Patricia Allison) turns out to be his illegitimate daughter, making her affair with Helena’s actor son Oz incestuous.
The rewriting is very clever, in that these events which shocked Ibsen’s audience are made contemporary by some subtle twists.
Since adultery is no longer shocking, we are led to question whether the sex was in fact consensual. Oz, a rightly stagey Callum Scot Howells, shows full Gen Z horror at this.
Victoria Smurfit’s many layered Helena becomes a victim of ‘coercive control.’ “When you spend your life in thrall to a monster you find yourself trying to make monstrous things somehow bearable.”
How do you update the pompous priest from the nineteenth century original? Easy. Andersen becomes a virtue-signalling boardroom policy wonk who convenes a Zoom call as if it’s a prayer meeting. Rhashan Stone is suitably annoying.
At the same time, the best of the original is kept. Such as Reggie’s plebian father perfectly captured here by Deka Walmsley.
When the play was first staged over a century ago critics argued the shocking revelations from this most dysfunctional of families were best greeted in silence. It is a testament to the brilliance of this updating in our blasé age that this just doesn’t happen.
For tickets go to https://lyric.co.uk/shows/
Pictured top: Victoria Smurfit in Ghosts at the Lyric Hammersmith (Picture: Helen Murray)
