The Welsh playwright Gary Owen has an impressive track record of “hot-wiring the classics” and “taking them on a white-knuckle joyride around 21st century issues”, said Rachel Halliburton in The Sunday Times. He has previously reimagined “Iphigenia”, “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Cherry Orchard”; now he has produced a “powerful” adaptation of Ibsen’s 1881 play “Ghosts”. Its themes – venereal disease, incest and suicide – were so shocking back then that booksellers banned it and no Norwegian theatre would stage it: the play had its premier in Chicago in 1882.
Owen’s update is a “cracker” – as “fresh as it’s twisted”, said Robert Gore-Langton in The Mail on Sunday. “I was taken aback by its inventiveness and the amount of comedy that a delighted audience discovered.”
In this era of anything goes, it’s tough to “deliver a ‘Ghosts’ spooked by taboos”, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. But this one pulls it off. Directed by Rachel O’Riordan, it retains the “toxic power” of the original – and it “will grip whether you know the play or don’t”.
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The setting here is not the dank Norwegian coast, but a mansion in an equally dank corner of rural Britain, said Nick Curtis in The London Standard. Syphilis is the malignant inheritance at the centre of Ibsen’s tragedy. Here, instead, the play looks at how sexual and physical abuse resonate through the generations – and it makes for a “wrenching, scorching piece of theatre”.
Among a fine cast, Victoria Smurfit – as the newly widowed Helena – lets “more and more grief emerge from her frozen control”, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. And Callum Scott Howells is “magnificent” as her son Oz, a failed actor who “flounces and bites”, but can’t hide his longing for love.
Alas, I found the evening “frustrating”, said Clive Davis in The Times. The reworking “seesaws between melodrama and awkward comedy”, while the actors play “second fiddle to the visuals” – “emoting at each other” across the cavernous, modernist set. It’s ambitious, but it doesn’t quite convince.
Lyric Hammersmith, London W6. Until 10 May
