Ghosts

Synopsis

Classic drama about a woman's struggle against prejudice and fear written in 1881. On her country estate, Mrs Alving is building an orphanage in memory of her dead husband. As her son Oswald, a successful artist living in Paris, returns home and the Pastor arrives to dedicate the orphanage, it seems she can finally bury the painful memories of her past. But over the course of one day, the dark secrets and unresolved tensions of the past are brutally exposed. The strange and complex relationships that bind Mrs Alving and her son to their maid Regina, her father Engstrand and to the priest Manders come to light - and we discover the shocking truth about her dead husband.

Our Review:

15 January 2007

We're so used to regarding Ibsen as a classic, it's hard to imagine this play about the past, the curse of parents and small town convention, provoked cries of outrage when it was first premiered in London. No such outcome is likely to befall Anna Mackmin's revival at the Gate, though the play - 120 years on from its creation - still has the power to chill, not so much for its graphic portrayal of the effects of syphilis and questioning of family values as the fear it induces about illness itself.

At least, this is one aspect Amelia Bullimore brings out brilliantly in her new version. There is an agonising moment, right at the end of Mackmin's production, when Niamh Cusack's distraught Mrs Alving contemplates the imbecilic terminal state into which her once golden artist son, Osvald (a fine Christian Coulson), recently returned home from a bohemian lifestyle in Paris, has descended. Faced with destroying the being to which she once gave life, Cusack conveys every inch the...

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