Review: GHOSTS, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

If the idea of spending time with your family over the festive season is one that makes you queasy, spare a thought for the Alvings. They have enough skeletons in the closet to populate a graveyard.

It is not hard to see why critics and audiences clamoured to pour scorn over Ghosts when it premiered in 1882. It would be a cliché to label Ibsen’s problem child play as before it’s time with its grubby scrutinisation of venereal disease, moral hypocrisy, and the radioactive fallout from toxic masculinity. Dare I say, it is the granddaddy of in-yer-face-theatre, unsparing in mapping the jagged erotic topography of its characters.

Wallowing bare-footed over a wine-red shag carpet, the strands of which seem to suck her deeper into the ground, Hattie Morahan’s velour-clad Helene Alving cannot shake off the putrid legacy of her dead husband, both emotionally and physically. She has buried the truth of his lecherous private life to preserve his public reputation.

But after her son Osvald returns from Paris living as an artist, their ethically upstanding bourgeois façade begins to crumble into dirt. "There are ghosts here right now" she frantically murmurs, eyes darting around the dark room. 

A mirrorred wall behind her traps them like rats in a maze; they have nowhere to run except into themselves. Joe Hill-Gibbins’ darkly intimate production draws on the eerie eroticism of David Lynch, the dim candlelight of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre only accentuating its dreamlike aura as scenes seemingly imperceptibly morph in and out of each other.

But for all the psychosexual slipperiness, it astonishingly retains the power to deliver a putrid gut punch: On the press night the grim reveal of Osvald’s unknowingly incestuous relationship with his father’s illegitimate daughter elicited a disgruntled walk out – something that must surely be worn as a badge of honour.

I don’t half blame them. There is something tantalisingly tactile about Hill-Gibbins’ direction. The way a quietly ferocious Morahan and Father Manders, played by a slippery Paul Hilton, sprawl across the shag rug like cats, the way the cardigan wrapped soft-boy Osvald, played by an intuitive Stuart Thompson, slips around bare legged in shorts, flirtatiously feeding his mother a peeled orange segment and slipping a fleshy finger into her mouth as he does so. Bleurgh. You’ll want to wash your hands afterwards.

Sound design is also kept austere to ramp up the theatre’s cosy intimacy. We can hear each heavy breath. But are they pants of bruising desperation or hot-blooded passion?

The only weak link is Father Manders, here a wily opportunist who arrogantly wields his title as a tool for his own gain. Hilton leans into the role’s sensuousness but slips too easily into one note melodrama. The aching conflict between the puritanical restraint he hypocritically pushes and Osvald’s free wheeling Bohemianism loses weight as a consequence, even if both are rendered equally obsolete by the play’s sinewy conclusion. 

Ghosts plays at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre until 28 January 

Photo Credits: Marc Brenner

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