GHOSTS. To 17 February.

London

GHOSTS
by Henrik Ibsen new version by Amelia Bullmore

Gate Theatre 11 Pembridge Road W11 3HQ To 17 February 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 35min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
www.gatetheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 January

Stark, punchy script and production.
Amelia Bullmore has acted humans, written Mammals and now adapts Ghosts; there’s scarcely a part of creation she hasn’t touched. Her version is punchy without being grindingly modern, bringing an actor’s sense of how little often needs saying to make a point. She ensures too that past events, sometimes spelled-out, sometimes assembled jigsaw-like, are all clear.

Her act-endings are splendidly written. When Osvald canoodles with Regine, as his father more than did with the young woman’s mother years before, Bullmore avoids most versions’ “Ghosts”, which always sounds a bit strange; the stopped-action and horror of Osvald’s mother makes the point far more sharply.

An act later, nobody specifies that the fire seen in a distance is the all-important Captain Alving Orphanage burning down. Self-realisation makes the point more forcefully for a modern audience. Olly Fox’s music, at once ethereal and eerie, sustained and discordant, unites these endings, the past variously coming back to life and going up in smoke.

But it’s the very end which best ties the production together, as Lez Brotherston’s 3-sided revolving shack, with its chest-high windows and single open-side showing during the acts, leaves Mrs Alving torn over her son’s assisted-death with its last move, till Niamh Cusak’s face is isolated, distressed as before the action began, tear-stained by the rain, agitated by her inner-turmoil.

Cusack’s shown an intelligent, assertive woman, who’s held secrets for years and lives for her son with his search for a happier life among artists in France. This investment in the future to compensate for the past gives Anna Mackmin’s production a fierce coherence reaching to the play’s roots.

It also makes Mrs Alving, whose mind revolves at least as much as the constricted chamber to which the action’s confined, central. So it’s right Cusack’s performance, rising to its intense climax in the closing minutes, has a passionate immediacy contrasted by the others, which seem slightly stylised in comparison.

But they are strong too, be it Finbar Lynch’s tight-suited, tight-mannered Manvers or Sarah Smart, who gives the maid Regine a genuine sense of grievance when she discovers the truth about herself.

Regine: Sarah Smart
Engstrand: Paul Copley
Pastor Manders: Finbar Lynch
Mrs Alving: Niamh Cusack
Osvald: Christian Coulson

Director: Anna Mackmin
Designer: Lez Brotherston
Lighting: Neil Austin
Composer: Olly Fox
Assistant director: Kate Budgen
Assistant designer: Emma Belli

2007-01-15 01:03:54