Ghosts West End Reviews

Owen revises Ibsen with tact. He doesn’t merely translate the text for a modern audience by making cuts and altering the language: this is a whole new play. He maintains all the original beats, but adds a layer of modern investment to the story, tr...

Owen revises Ibsen with tact. He doesn’t merely translate the text for a modern audience by making cuts and altering the language: this is a whole new play. He maintains all the original beats, but adds a layer of modern investment to the story, transposing it in a way that makes complete sense in the here and now. The working-class struggle coexists on the same level as wealthy Gen Z ennui and the lack of prospects for new generations. But that’s not the point of this. Oz’s rich-people problems pale in the shadow of the Captain’s deeds. Yet, Owen refrains from introducing his characters as bare vehicles of immorality who come down their ivory tower to deliver a message to the masses. They’re complex creatures who suffer the consequences of the world they live in. The show is tender and raw; domestic abuse becomes a gilded cage.

Though this interpretation succeeds in becoming a story for the present, it struggles tonally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the glut of incest narratives to land on the London stage in the past six months – see also The Other Place a...

Though this interpretation succeeds in becoming a story for the present, it struggles tonally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the glut of incest narratives to land on the London stage in the past six months – see also The Other Place and double whammy of Oedipuses – it’s that when the guilty parties get down to it, audiences will gasp then snigger, loudly. Oz and Reggie’s (Patricia Allison) icky intimacy is also met with laughs. And though it gets there eventually, the chemistry between Smurfit’s Helena and Rhashan Stone’s level-headed Andersen (a lawyer not a pastor here) takes a while to warm up.

Ghosts exemplifies Ibsen’s creed that the key events of a play take place before it starts: everyone is either hiding, or having hidden, something from them. The actors grippingly chart the negotiation of these secrets and suspicions. Victoria Smur...

Ghosts exemplifies Ibsen’s creed that the key events of a play take place before it starts: everyone is either hiding, or having hidden, something from them. The actors grippingly chart the negotiation of these secrets and suspicions. Victoria Smurfit’s Helena shows how the greater agency of a modern Mrs Alving has not prevented moral compromises but also allows her contemporary solutions. Callum Scott Howells as Oz is sassy, sarcastic but ecstatic at the prospect even of dangerous love.

Smurfit is magnetic in expensive cream athleisurewear, hair artfully sleeked and cheekbones burnished like a battle visor: she’s not afraid to appear hard and unlikeable. Scott-Howells is an edgy and fascinating actor, always pushing the envelope o...

Smurfit is magnetic in expensive cream athleisurewear, hair artfully sleeked and cheekbones burnished like a battle visor: she’s not afraid to appear hard and unlikeable. Scott-Howells is an edgy and fascinating actor, always pushing the envelope of what is permissible. Stone, ever-dependable, is terrific here. Allison, part of the extraordinary talent school that was Sex Education, has a quietly compelling authority on stage. Deka Walmsley completes a fine cast as her father Jacob. Well, when I say ‘father’...

Each actor rises to the challenge: Stone walks a brilliantly controlled line between sanctimonious and sympathetic, Smurfit lets more and more grief emerge from her frozen control, Allison and above all Howells grapple painfully with a sense of lives...

Each actor rises to the challenge: Stone walks a brilliantly controlled line between sanctimonious and sympathetic, Smurfit lets more and more grief emerge from her frozen control, Allison and above all Howells grapple painfully with a sense of lives ruined before they have even begun. O’Riordan’s taut direction never lets the tension, or the sense of wounded humanity slacken. I suspect Ibsen would have been proud.

Peals of audience laughter are not the sound you normally associate with Ibsen. Gary Owen’s updated version of the playwright’s brooding drama about an embattled widow, an orphanage and the poisonous legacy of a dissolute husband certainly isn’...

Peals of audience laughter are not the sound you normally associate with Ibsen. Gary Owen’s updated version of the playwright’s brooding drama about an embattled widow, an orphanage and the poisonous legacy of a dissolute husband certainly isn’t lacking in courage. In his latest offering at the Lyric Hammersmith in London the Welsh playwright throws himself into rearranging the original storyline of Ghosts, but the sudden shifts in tone, sometimes lurching from awkward comedy to Grand Guignol in a few sentences, undermine Rachel O’Riordan’s production.

The production reunites Owen with director Rachel O’Riordan after their harrowing 2022 Iphigenia in Splott, and a similarly queasy sense of gnawing discomfort permeates this piece. Here, themes of generational trauma and the experiences of abuse su...

The production reunites Owen with director Rachel O’Riordan after their harrowing 2022 Iphigenia in Splott, and a similarly queasy sense of gnawing discomfort permeates this piece. Here, themes of generational trauma and the experiences of abuse survivors come to the fore. Owen’s revised, contemporary-language dialogue feels on-the-nose at times. Yet there is an appealing thread of pitch-black humour running through the text. As the story unfolds, Owen constantly shifts blame and judgement, and highlights potentially exonerating contextual details between the characters. Each horrible new revelation is quickly refuted by a sharp counter argument, as Owen unflinchingly examines all sides of every contentious topic.