Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London

Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production of Ghosts is the first Ibsen to be staged in the candelit glow of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, and it looks remarkable. Set and costumes, designed by Rosanna Vise, are from a decadent mid-20th century society. The back wall consists of mirrors and the floor a cocoon of blood red, deep pile carpet. It is alluring and disturbing like the costumes – the upper class characters in velvet dresses and satin waistcoats, enfolding iron gloves. From the upper levels, the production takes place beneath a bank of six chandeliers which, while offering more of a glimpsed view than a theatre audience would expect, show the action in soft focus. The whole production looks like Visconti’s 1963 film, ‘The Leopard’, in its low light designed to reveal only costly surfaces. Osvald, infected with syphilis, compares his softening brain to “cherry-coloured velvet”, and the setting depicts suffocating interiors from which there is no escape.

It remains hard to imagine how Ibsen’s play, still direct and shocking, would have seemed to its original audience. Hill-Gibbins deploys the high end cast at his disposal with relish, and they make the most of Ibsen’s brutal exposé of hypocrisy. Paul Hilton’s Parson Manders is a canting fool, a man whose only show of strength lies in his moral convictions, which are thoroughly mistaken. It is hard to imagine why Hattie Morahan’s Helene Alving loved him, but the fact she did makes the poverty of her existence plain. She gives a riveting performance, quivering with a lifetime’s suppressed rage, then collapsing with absolute despair. Stuart Thompson as her son, Osvald, conveys the character’s conflicting emotions and failure to escape his social constraints very well indeed. Sarah Slimani’s Regene is blunt and unsentimental, the only character with any hope of achieving any freedom. And Greg Hicks is brilliant as the wheedling, deceitful Engstram, who has Manders in the palm of his hand. He creeps around the stage with his bad leg, like Richard III without the social position. Yet we feel a residual sympathy for a man whose class has limited his opportunities to opening a brothel and getting others to fund his drinking.

Hill-Gibbins, consistently one of the most interesting British directors of the classics, pulls off a sophisticated, layered account. He has also adapted the play, and the version is crisp and startling. This production shows the quality of productions that the Globe Theatre, frustratingly inconsistent in the past, can and should be staging. It also reconfirms the reputation of Ghosts as one of the touchstone plays that made modern theatre.