BWW Reviews: GHOSTS, Greenwich Theatre, April 30 2013

In wealthy widow Mrs Alving's drawing room, Pastor Manders is putting the finishing touches to the admin relating to a new orphanage for the rural community - to be dedicated the very next day in honour of Mr Alving, dead these last ten years. Mrs Alving can be bothered with neither the priest's fussing nor his trumpeted religious morality - she has eyes only for her son, returned from Paris and strangely listless. He has eyes only for the maid, Regina, who is finding that the manor house is not quite far enough away from her father, Jacob, a boozer whose eye is always on the next source of ready cash.

Alfred Enoch's adaptation of Ibsen's classic retains the spirit and crushing satire of the original, but updates the language to make it accessible to Sell A Door's target audience of young adults - casting Hollyoaks starlet Tamaryn Payne will have helped that cause. If the second half is a little long, there's plenty to admire in the performances of a fine company, especially Deborah Blake and Robert Gill as the lovers who never were, thirty years on. There's more than a whiff of the horrors of pre-penicillin cures - enough to make the safe-sex generation feel like they're not the only ones whose fun is circumscribed.

What works best, some 130 years after Ghosts outraged critics, is its brutal condemnation of those who insist that people resist what feels right, in favour of what they believe (or what they are told to believe) is right. In Pastor Manders' squawking moralism, a suffocating blanket he throws over anyone who comes near, one can hear an echo of today's politicians and their willingness to generalise about benefit claimants. In the priest's swift accommodation of those whom he damned not moments before (if there's a benefit accruing to himself natch), there's something of the politicians' hypocrisy too.

Ibsen shines a light into some dark corners of the human psyche - we might not like what he reveals, but it's hard to deny its truth.

Ghosts continues at Greenwich Theatre until 5 May.

Photo Darren Bell

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