Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Ghosts in Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play are not of the supernatural variety — no bumps in the night or spooky goings-on. Yet you might assume as much if you heard the audience gasps in Gary Owen’s gripping new version, led by flintily excellent Callum Scott Howells. It’s quite something that, in the hands of Owen and director Rachel O’Riordan, this desolate tale of secrets and lies still has the power to shock.No theatre would stage Ibsen’s coruscating play when it was first written, managers shying away from the Norwegian’s frank treatment of incest, venereal disease and social hypocrisy. Owen strips away some of the details to make the drama work in a contemporary context. So when young Oswald — Oz here — returns to his family home to mark the opening of a charitable institution in his deceased father’s name, he’s not suffering from inherited syphilis. (In Ibsen’s original it was a physical symptom of the damage handed down from father to son.) Instead, Owen focuses on the psychological scars that the dead man inflicted on everyone present, and the toxic legacy of secrets and abuse.At first, it’s bitterly funny. Scott Howells’s Oz, a spiky, sullen presence, pads through the living room in his underpants, dropping one-liners with perfect timing. “Don’t worry, it’s not all for me,” he chirps blithely as he makes off to his room with a couple of bottles of vintage wine. He and his mother, Helena, a cagey, brittle Victoria Smurfit, spar and smoulder, as Oz makes plain his resentment at being sent away to school at an early age. But gradually the truths creep out: Oz’s sharp tongue arises from a deep self-loathing and painful desire for affection; Helena’s defensiveness is born out of years of arming herself against a cheating, coercive husband. And then when Oz and Helena’s young maid Reggie, played with fierce integrity by Patricia Allison, become close, a terrible truth emerges.In this reworking we feel acutely the theme of parenthood: in Helena’s story, in the demands of local builder Jacob (Deka Walmsley), who helped to cover up a scandal in the family by taking in Reggie as his own and now wants his dues, and in the nature of the institution set to be opened. In Ibsen’s text it’s an orphanage, here it’s a hospital for sick children. We do lose some of the wider critique, however. The original is in part a broadside against widespread social hypocrisy. When we learn that Helena once tried to flee her toxic marriage but was sent back by Pastor Manders (who here becomes suave lawyer Andersen), it’s more to do with the personal history between them than social opprobrium.There’s an element of melodrama to the production and it takes a while to settle: initially the prickly conversation between Helena and Rhashan Stone’s Andersen feels sticky and burdened by exposition. But it’s still a riveting moral and emotional rollercoaster. O’Riordan’s taut production ratchets up the tension on Merle Hensel’s spare, symbolic set: a smart leather sofa and expensive drinks cabinet adrift against the backdrop of a huge translucent window, beyond which the mist swirls and eddies. And looming over everything are hulking images on the wall of the dead man, who haunts everyone onstage. ★★★★☆To May 10, lyric.co.uk
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