“When you spend your life in thrall to a monster you find yourself trying to make monstrous
things somehow bearable.”
Helena is a woman on a mission. Since the death of her high-flying husband, she has dedicated herself to reclaiming his legacy. And her hard work is about to pay off, with a new children’s hospital bearing his name on the brink of opening.
But when their son Oz returns to the family home for the grand unveiling, he has ambitions
of his own. Ambitions that threaten to unravel their family’s most tightly kept secrets.
Gary Owen’s new play, a contemporary reimagining of Ibsen’s classic, is directed by Artistic
Director Rachel O’Riordan, reuniting the team behind the critically acclaimed Iphigenia in
Splott, Romeo and Julie and Killology.
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 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.
| 1894 | Broadway |
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| 2010 | West End |
London Production West End |
| 2013 | West End |
West End Revival West End |
| 2015 | Off-Broadway |
Brooklyn Academy of Music Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Lincoln Center Theater Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | West End |
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