Theatre review: Ghosts ‘Today’s moral landscape imposes itself on Ibsen’s play’

This is Henrik Ibsen, but not as we know him. Writer Gary Owen updates the action from 19th-century Norway to 21st-century Britain; from the gloom of a Norwegian fjord to the billowing mists of the Cornish coast. However, it is today’s moral landscape that imposes itself on the play.

Those who know Ibsen’s original will wait in vain for much of the plot to emerge. But they will not go unrewarded. Callum Scott Howells is superb as mercurial actor Oz, the emotionally fragile son who has returned to the grand home of his widowed mother Helena, played by Victoria Smurfit.

She is planning to fund a new children’s hospital with her dead husband’s fortune. However, the go-between for the project here is not Ibsen’s pastor who in the original insists that Helena trust God to protect the hospital rather than deny His authority by taking out insurance (what could possibly go wrong?). No, Owen’s equivalent of male rectitude is Helena’s lawyer and former lover Andersen (Rhashan Stone) who as the nascent hospital’s trustee insists she remove her husband’s name from the building lest his sexual history as rapist tarnishes the project.

In Rachel O’Riordan’s cool, minimalist production replacing Christian values with today’s judgmental cancel culture works well as an alternative oppressive code. However, cracks in the logic of the updating appear when we are asked to believe that Smurfit’s confident, gloriously selfish and moneyed Helena is so worried about public opinion that she opts for a diminished life rather than confront the ticking truths that will inevitably destroy her family.

Still, it is worth suspending just enough disbelief to allow It’s A Sin star Howells to reveal his mesmerising stage talent. Opposite Patricia Allison as Helena’s maid Reggie, he delivers a portrait of vulnerable entitlement that is so electric I would have loved to have seen it in a more conventional production where the psychology is unimpeachable.