Far Away

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Samuel Gosrani , Lizzie Hopley and Lorna Dale. Photo © EllieKurttz

Far Away by Caryl Churchill – Ambika P3, London

Published at Plays International

The last major production of Far Away, directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Donmar Warehouse, was brought to a premature conclusion by the COVID pandemic – exactly the type of global environmental disaster that lurks in the background of Caryl Churchill terrifying masterpiece. Since its premiere, 25 years ago, the reputation of Far Away has grown slowly but surely, and playwrights like Alistair McDowell cite it as a key text. Prescient, deeply disturbing, and naggingly unforgettable, it is probably time to acknowledge it as a 21st century classic.

Rebecca McCutcheon’s production, for her company Lost Text/Found Space, is staged in the astonishing, cavernous depths of Ambika P3. The venue, a supersized concrete basement below the University of Westminster’s Marylebone Road building, is generally used as a visual arts venue. Far Away is thought to be the first theatre staged here, and McCutcheon is the ideal person to do it. Lost Text/Found Space specialise in site-specific productions of forgotten plays, principally by women. Caryl Churchill isn’t forgotten category but it could be argued that, for the country’s greatest living playwright, she is significantly underperformed. The profiles of her male contemporaries – Stoppard, Hare, Ayckbourn – are substantially higher, but she outstrips them in originality, consistency, variety and sheer, unnerving insight. The prophet, of course, cannot expect honour in her own land.

Far Away is therefore an astute choice, both in terms of its importance to the world of the 21st century, and its suitability for the venue. McCutcheon’s production is ambitious. Ambika P3 consists of a vast, windowless space, like a slightly smaller Turbine Hall, which at first glance presents huge challenges as a performance space. However, the production makes brilliant use of the venue’s qualities. The audience is guided through a roller shutter onto a balcony overlooking a dark void marked out with telegraph poles and cut through with shafts of light (part of Jack Hathaway’s excellent lighting design). The world of the play – like a starker version of our own – is set up with a short prologue section then, at a peremptory whistle from a cast member, the audience is summoned below. It turns out Ambika has a small warren of side rooms and curiously-shaped spaces, and the play is performed across several of these. The designs, by Nicola Hewitt-George, treat these spaces like a series of installations. We glimpse a miniature landscape of earth and telegraph poles, or perhaps grave markers, and watch the opening farmhouse scene through net curtains hanging in a huge space, which later fills up with mutilated furniture. The soundscape, by Lucy Ann Harrison, sampled from ambient noises in the venue, is central to the show’s atmosphere.

The settings, skilfully conjured, are unsettling and oppressive. The audience perches on chairs, or leans on pillars to watch, trying to come to terms with the absence of comfort, which also pervades the play. Far Away transpires in three scenes across different setting and times, written with a taught focus that does not waste a single word. The first scene, with a young girl, Joan (Lorna Dale) and an older woman, Harper (Lizzie Hopley) talking in the kitchen, is an astonishing exercise in stripping away the trappings of civilisation. Joan has seen something very disturbing, and Harper’s explanations change as she realises how much the girl knows, smoothly expanding normality to encompass the most brutal acts. Hopley plays Harper with a rural accent – Shropshire, perhaps – which creates a false, motherly reassurance. Dale is totally convincing as a 14-year old, doubling the role with the older Joan who appears in the later scenes.

The play then moves to hat factory, where Joane works with Todd (Samuel Gosrani) making hats for surreal competition which is gradually revealed as something spectacularly dark. At its 2000 première, this scene seemed to comment on the Balkan Wars, but its violent public spectacle has since become entrenched in culture through shows such as Hunger Games and Squid Game. Churchill’s laser-focused satire is balanced against short exchanges between Todd and Joan as they become interested in one another. Their sweet, spiky relationship is played subtly and persuasively by Dale and Gosrani. From the balcony, we return to the side room and a post apocalyptic future in which nature is siding with nations in a series of ludicrous but genuine conflicts: the elephants work with the Koreans, the cats are on the side of the French, and it is no longer acceptable to hate deer. It is filled with frenetic, climate crisis paranoia, and has one of the boldest, most confidently abrupt endings in theatre.

Far Away conjures the dystopian future its seems we are now living with a eerie foresight. McCutcheon’s production is truly immersive, plunging us into a environment where everything familiar suddenly seems strange and different, and we are confronted with ourselves. She makes the venue serve the play in a highly effective way, and her use of the huge central space, where scenes are prefigured rather than enacted, is ingenious. The show is a very high quality piece of work: important, valuable drama presented in a way that means the audience will find it very hard to forget. Churchill’s work continues to prove its worth by showing us the things we can no longer see because we have forgotten that, once, they were not normal.

Clive

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Paul Keating as Thomas. Photo by Ikin Yum.

Clive by Michael Wynne – Arcola Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

At first he seems a little fussy but in control of his life, an impression that disintegrates over the course of an hour as his obsession with cleanliness grows, his isolation increases, and rejection mounts as it becomes clear that real connection is beyond him. Even the cactus has the capacity to hurt him.  

The show, imaginatively directed by Lucy Bailey, makes great use of the Arcola’s studio theatre. Mike Britton’s wall of cupboards brings bursts of colour into the space as doors are opened, and Chris Davey’s lighting transforms the flat into “Mexico”, “Iceland”, or whatever Thomas asks Alexa.  

Keating – who worked so successfully with Bailey at the Arcola in 2016 when he starred in Mike Poulton’s play Kenny Morgan, telling the story of Terence Rattigan’s real-life inspiration for The Deep Blue Sea – is excellent. He holds the audience’s attention effortlessly and draws them into his increasingly dysfunctional world. He moves from gleeful dancing, polishing the floor with mops attached to his feet, to a full-blown crisis over the course of a well-balanced performance. His victimization as a gay man drives the psychological difficulties that begin to engulf him, retreating from a world that does not seem to want him.  

However, the script by Wynne – who won an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy for his 2009 play The Priory – falls somewhat short. The tone is uneven, with the titular cactus bringing a more whacky than gothic tone to the story, which seems at odds with the abusive and self-destructive behaviour surrounding Thomas. There is also too much telling, as Thomas explains what he is doing and why, narrating his own actions while telling us little we do not already know. Thomas also seems naïve about people in a way that does not fully convince us he is a fully realized character.  

The play was inspired by Philip Ridley’s Covid-era dramatic monologue The Poltergeist, but Clive lacks the weirdness and unremitting menace that make Ridley’s work so compelling. Clive is a well-performed and produced show, but the writing is too predictable for it to be more than the sum of its parts. 

The Estate

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Adeel Akhtar, Thusitha Jayasundera and Shelley Conn. Copyright: Helen Murray

The Estate by Shann Sahota

Shann Sahota’s new play is a family drama, tying Southall to Westminster. Adeel Akhtar’s Angad Singh is a government minister, seizing the unexpected opportunity to stand for the party leadership. It quickly gets personal, and his relationship with his two sisters, Gyan (Thusitha Jayasundera) and Malicka (Shelley Conn), and with his late father, become political collateral. Sahota’s writing is very sharp, and she explores themes somewhat outside general discourse – the equivocal position of south Asians within the British establishment, misogyny in Sikh families, and what families have to hide when society expects them to justify their existence by being better than everyone else.

The performances are excellent too. Adeel Akhtar brings his vulnerability and the underlying menace he can produced, which is all the more disturbing for being so expected. He is thoroughly compelling, although it is a little hard to believe that someone quite as self-abasing has made it up the political ladder. His sisters are equally well-played. Thusitha Jayasundera superb, as always, as the motherly older sister ground down by Angad’s refusal to share his inheritance equally with his sisters, against their domineering father’s wishes. Shelley Conn is impressively combustible as the furious, younger sibling. The spiky atmosphere of a minister’s office is amusingly embodied by advisers Petra (Helena Wilson) and Isaac (Fode Simbo). The power of establishment is represented by the towering, besuited figure of Ralph (Humphrey Ker).

Daniel Raggett’s production is thoroughly enjoyable. He stages the play as a drawing room drama on a set that could double for a Noël Coward, complete with sliding wooden panels by Chloe Lamford. The Dorfman is set out, unusually, in a proscenium configuration, playing on the expectations of traditional theatre by using a familiar form to tell stories about ‘brown’ people, as Angad puts it. The Estate is a straight show – a family drama that plays out in a linear fashion, which brings limitations too, but within her own parameters Sahota has done an excellent job.

Inter Alia

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Rosamund Pike. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Inter Alia by Suzie Miller – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

Judge Jessica Parks (Rosamund Pike) juggles a high profile career as one of a small number of female justices with the usual pressures of family life – trying keep an eye on her son Harry (Jasper Talbot) while assuaging the ego of her barrister husband Michael (Jamie Glover), and living an upper middle class dinner party lifestyle with their friends. She is both a pioneering, feminist judge who stands up to the patriarchy and tries to do things differently, particularly in her treatment of rape victims, and a mother whose role is to shoulder the family’s emotional burdens. Suzie Miller’s new play is a follow up to her hit Prime Facie with Jodie Comer, and is set in the same high pressure legal world in which she once worked – but Inter Alia also has the plot line of a Greek drama. It asks how far a mother would go to protect her son.

Justin Martin’s production builds the tension through a physicality, to which Rosamund Pike is beautifully suited. She deploys the pin-point timing of a farce as she pulls coats, wigs and ironing boards from cupboards in her kitchen, powering through her life without a moment to spare, entertainingly depicted through Lucy Hind’s movement direction. She also struts her stuff on the bench, addressing the prosecution with a microphone stand and backing band consisting of her husband and son. The set, by Miriam Buether, hides the domestic behind the courtroom and, behind that a dark wood filled with towering trees into which her son disappears, both as a child and as an 18-year old – not a subtle metaphor, but a satisfying scenic effect.

The writing is direct, and sometimes too obvious. The nature of the dilemma Jessica faces cannot be revealed without spoilers, but it is clear what will happen from early on. Her principles are tested in way that is cruel and believable. However, it draws the audience into the terrible moral conundrum while effectively addressing issues of online toxicity, the manosphere and the unequal justice system. There are moments of particular power, not least when Michael, perfectly pitched by Glover, collapses in tears at his inability to communicate with his son.

The show’s focus on the terrible power of blood ties is cleverly enhanced by the physical absence of almost any actors beyond the family trio. Jessica’s best friend and her dinner party guests are present on stage, but only in our imaginations. It’s an ingenious technique and, when new actors do appear they are children who drive the disturbing plot developments. Inter Alia is a high quality production of an effective if limited play. It will undoubtedly be a big success because of Pike’s triumphant performance, owning holding our attention, and the show together from start to finish.

Showmanism

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Photo by Sarah Ainslie

Showmanism by Dickie Beau – Hampstead Theatre, London

Published at Plays International.

Dickie Beau, wearing a white jumpsuit, stands on the edge of the stage and speaks the first line of ‘Hamlet’: “Who’s there?”. By the end of his 90-minute, one-man show he has returned to the same downstage spot, but now he has cast aside physical presence and embraced pure being. In between lies a rigorous, personal and brilliant exploration of theatrical history and the meaning of performance: to seek an audience, to speak so they can hear, to perform. Remarkably, this is achieved using other people’s voices. Dickie Beau is a lip-syncer and, unless you caught his previous show at Hampstead Theatre, Re-Member Me, or Showmanism itself on its first outing in Bath, you will not have seen anything like this.

Lip-syncing could seem gimmicky or superficial, but in Beau’s hands it is a tool that cuts right to the heart of being. An interviewee describes the invention of sound recording as a break-through for puppetry, as it allowed the performers to concentrate on the spectacle. Beau channels the physicality of the people he impersonates, so the audience recognises distinct individuals, even without hearing their voices. He performs to interviews he has recorded with a fascinating range of actors, trainers and thinkers. At the starry end of the spectrum, his discussions with Ian McKellen are very funny, including an account of Sir Ian’s worst night on stage, and various asides to noisy builders interrupting the recording. But generally Beau chooses to channel the words of people who are less famous but have remarkable insight to offer, including Greek actress Mimi Denissi, impressionist Steve Nallon, critic Rupert Christiansen, voice coach Patsy Rodenburg, and psychedelic teacher Ram Dass.

Beau performs on a set by Justin Nardella which consists of a white platform and a backdrop of hanging objects, from televisions to an astronaut’s helmet. Marty Langthorne’s lighting is instrumental in conjuring a range of spaces, including a box of light in which Beau becomes trapped, mime-style, by invisible walls. With minimal but carefully chosen props, including a Yorick skull, a ladder, a bath and a beautiful pop-up album filled with masks and auditoriums, he switches from person to person and idea to idea, weaving a thesis on theatre. It is completely riveting, even as interviewees delve deep into abstract concepts.

Showmanism, with a nod in its title to the idea actors as priests conducting the audience in a ritual, offers a succession of thought-provoking insights. The advent of speech, a mere 35,000 years ago, is discussed as humanity;s most successful technological innovation. Greek theatres are ‘stone ears’, calibrated so the audience can hear every word. An actor addressing a skull is the single image that represents theatre. People inhabit their bodies like space suits, hidden inside. But there is emotional connection too. Stripped to his underpants (admired by Ian McKellen), Beau is asked why he performs, and whether it is to escape. “What is the point?” he asks, lip syncing to a recording of his own voice. Fiona Shaw helps to answer, with her heart-stopping account of performing at Epidavros, feeling in the utter silence that she could be back in 400 BC. Theatre can transport performers and audience, and transform them too.

The show is directed by Jan-Willem van der Bosch, who should take a great deal of credit for his partnership with Beau. Together they make Showmanism both intellectually ambitious and a theatrical delight. Material that looks dry on paper is brought vividly to life, the audience plunged into the heart of arguments that seem to cut to heart of our reasons for being. Beau is gently funny too, including a recurring gag about Edmund Kean’s fabled sword, which he eventually uses to butter some toast. And he is physical, creating a performance style that reinvents mime as something new and significant. He seems to channel voices in way which, as an interviewee suggests, would have once had him burned as a witch. It is a rich and satisfying evening from a performer who does not fit the accepted categories, and is all the better for it.

Einkvan

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Photo ©Tristram Kenton

Einkvan by Jon Fosse – Coronet Theatre, London

Published at Plays International

Kjersti Horn’s production of Jon Fosse’s Einkvan, visiting The Coronet Theatre on tour, is a startlingly experimental piece of theatre. Horn is artistic director of the Det Norske Teatret in Oslo, and she is working with perhaps her country’s foremost writer in Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is unusual in being known equally for his novels and his plays, and the production provides a rare opportunity to see his work on the London stage. It does not disappoint, being both simultaneously dark and compassionate, with a staging that unpicks fundamental assumptions about the stage.

Both set and costumes are designed by Sven Haraldsson, but their main role is to obscure the action. The performers are concealed for the entire hour-long show behind an opaque plastic curtain which surrounds the stage. Only their faint dark outlines are visible as they perform the play. Instead, we see them through two large video screens hanging above the stage. The action is filmed with handheld cameras, with a single face shown in close-up on each screen. The video work, by Mads Sjøgård Pettersen, frames the audience’s perception of the entire show. The unseen camera operators are crucial performers, driving the mood with tighter, more disturbing close-ups as the tension slowly builds. Pettersen and Borgar Skjelstad, who together film the action, rightly take a bow at the end.

Einkvan is Norwegian for ‘uniqueness’. The play is performed in subtitle Norwegian by a cast of six, playing a mother, a father, a son and their apparent doppelgangers – characters who look similar although not identical but appear to live parallel lives. Only two characters ever appear at a time, one on each screen. The play consists of a series of first-hand accounts of meetings. Both the mothers and the fathers encounter the sons unexpectedly in the street, and are baffled when they refuse to reply to their enquiries about why it’s been so long since they met, or their invitations to supper.

These encounters use ritualised repetition, but are also naturalistic. Fosse strips language back to its hidden core, using no superfluous words. This directness, which seems very Norwegian to a UK audience, is also strangely moving. The failure of people to connect – parents with children, but also friends with one another and people with themselves – seems a highly apt social metaphor for the 21st century. It may be even more than that. At times it feels as though Fosse has traced the source of all our social ills, and is shining a spotlight on it.

The performers – Laila Goody and Marianne Krogh as the two mothers, Jon Bleiklie Devik and Per Schaanning as the fathers, Vetle Bergan and Preben Hodneland as the sons – are very effective at delivering performances in close-up, a technique which is undoubtedly much harder than they make it look. The performances to a camera on stage is reminiscent of Andrew Scott’s breakthrough stage appearance twenty years ago, filming himself on the Royal Court stage in ‘A Girl in a Car with a Man’, but this takes the challenge to a whole new level. Characters are constantly interacting with one another across cameras, and at one point even staging a fight in a bath. All the actors are compelling throughout. In fact, the whole play holds the audience rapt, a remarkable achievement for a show in which the actors only appear in the flesh at the curtain call. When they do, the dissonance is sharp as we emerge from what feels like a dream, suffused with sadness and loss, tenderness and a powerful endorsement of the need for humans to support and love one another.

Scenes from a Repatriation

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Photo: Alex Brenner

Published at Plays International

Scenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan – Royal Court Upstairs, London

Joel Tan’s new play is an ambitious overview of a post-colonial world, examined through the fraught question of museum repatriations. A statue of the Boddhisattva Guanyin, on display in the British Museum overlooing the gift shop, becomes the focus of attention in the UK and in China, from where it was stolen during the destruction and looting of the Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, by British and French troops. The violence of this act echoes in the opening moments of the play. The production, directed by emma + pj, has powerful sound design by Patch Middleton, who conjures the screams and earth-shaking roars as soldiers burn the palace in a fire which killed more than 300 servants.

Scenes from a Repatriation switches characters and sometimes eras with each scene. They are announced on a screen formatted like object labels in a museum. The play is in two parts. The first half, set in the present day, tells the story of pressure on British Museum curators to return Guanyin to China, while exploring the experience of people of Chinese origin living in the UK. The second half takes place in China after the return, and features more loosely connected scenes, probing politics, money, social relations in China itself. Tan pushes the limits of the format, staging an epic with a cast of only six, in the Royal Court’s small Upstairs space. It is not entirely successful, but when it works it works well.

The cast, constantly switching roles, do a very good job of telling a narrative that always remains entirely clear. The cast are predominantly performers of Chinese origin, and some scenes are performed in subtitled Cantonese and Mandarin, rare on the London stage. Kaja Chan switches with great fluidity between roles from English curator to Mandarin-speaking secret police interrogator. Sky Yang shows similar range, moving among roles that include a protesting Chinese student and the Scottish soldier who first looted the statue.

The play gives us much to admire, and is also frustrating at times. It would have benefited from an edit. There are a couple of scenes that do not work well, in particular an encounter at a party between a wealthy Chinese businessman, an ingratiating employee and his hired female companion, in which the characters appear either stupid or viciously misogynistic. The production’s tone is also confusing at times, shifting between broad parody – a comic posh curator, a doddery professor, a protest group called Islington Witches for Change – and the intense realism of an interrogation in a Hong Kong prison cell, which diffuse the play’s focus and impact.

However, many scenes do really hit home. A student, boycotting the British Museum, explains to his tutor how Guan Yin is a surrogate mother figure for young Chinese people far from him. A flashback takes us into the mind of a soldier looking down on himself as he loots the Summer Palace. The tokenism of a Chinese-themed British Museum Late is neatly skewered. And the interrogation scene, in which a cartoonist is questioned about the political intentions of his work, is powerful – the interrogator perched high up behind a screen and a civilised veneer that fails to hide that the outcome is never in doubt.

Scenes From a Repatriation brings wider issues to the stage that are both current and neglected. The conduct of the British and colonial armies in China in successive opium wars during the second half of the 19th century, intentionally forgotten in the West, is well-remembered in China and influences international politics now as much as it ever did. The return of looted objects is an issue becoming impossible to ignore. But the play is also about human dislocation: Chinese people looked down upon in the UK, Chinese students propping up the higher education system, oppression of Uiyghurs, crackdowns in Hong Kong. Empires then and empires now use people as their currency.

The production is urgent and exciting – video from Tyler Forward and lighting by Alex Fernandes are integral to the fast-paced story-telling. Joel Tan’s play is entertaining and urgent, with so many stories to tell that they cannot be contained. Perhaps if more work by writers and performers from Chinese backgrounds was staged, there would be less need to cover everything in one go. However, Tan has created real political theatre, dramatising debates that are difficult, unresolved and unavoidable, and reflecting our society in an unexpected light. The Royal Court is fulfilling its mission by staging plays like these.

Krapp’s Last Tape

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Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett – Barbican Theatre, London

With the pre-announcement of not one, but two future productions of Krapp’s Last Tape scheduled for the mid-2030s (when Sam West and Richard Dormer reach 69, the age of Beckett’s main character), it’s reasonable to ask what makes actors want to play this role so much. To some extent, it could be that recording the lines for younger Krapp at 39 represents a solid investment in future work. But there is also a clear sense that this is one of the big roles, a defining part, and one that suits unconventional actors better than classic leads. Stephen Rea is very much the kind of performer suited to Krapp. Actually 78, although he very much does not look it, Rea bring a hangdog comedy and a deep sadness to a role others have approached with more rage and less stillness. He also met Beckett himself, who attended rehearsals for the Royal Court’s 1976 production of ‘Endgame’ with Rea in the cast.

Vicky Featherstone’s production is designed by Jamie Vartan, who places Krapp’s desk in a square of light beyond which lies only darkness. A path of light leads from the desk to a door, beyond which lies smoke, the drink which Krapp retires periodically to consume, with a comic sloshing sound, and who knows what else. The set also aids the silent comedy at the heart of Beckett’s play, in the form of a ludicrously long desk drawer which Krapp pulls out further and further to reach his hidden bananas. Rea plays the sad clown very well, dialling down the slipping on banana skins but emphasising the shambling walk, which looks both exaggerated and weirdly familiar. The inevitable comedy of decay is inseparable from the sadness, loneliness and failure that haunts Krapp, in the form of his naive 39-year old self, still seeking and possibly expecting happiness. His writing, unlike that of Beckett, faded away despite his epiphany in a storm, which he can not longer bear to hear about.

Stephen Rea recorded the Krapp tapes in his 60s, but they sound like the work of a younger man. The weighted precision of his delivery makes very word matter a great deal, to Krapp and to Beckett as writers and to us as an audience. His performance is heartbreaking without ever needing to fully express the emotions we know he is feeling. This play, so slight, remains a work of remarkable power that can bind the entire audience of a large theatre into the unravelling existence of one man.

Ghosts

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Victoria Smurfit and Rhashan Stone. Credit: Helen Murray

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen adapted by Gary Owen – Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Published at Plays International.

The back of The Captain’s heavy, balding head is literally papered onto the walls of Merle Hensel’s set for the Lyric’s new version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in a repeating patten. He may be dead, but his menacing presence looms large in the lives of everyone he has left behind. Meanwhile, the rear wall is a curtain of mist, dimly reflecting the characters who wander, lost, through a mental fog. The marble and leather opulence of the expensive interior does nothing to disguise the unresolved anguish which is pulling everyone apart from the inside. The Captain was a larger-than-life figure, a bully, a philanderer and arapist. Gary Owen’s pin-sharp updating of Ibsen’s classic preserves the generational impact of dark, unacknowledged secrets, while making them completely of the moment.

The Lyric’s boss, Rachel O’Riordan, has a fruitful artistic relationship with Owen including their hit Iphigenia in Splott. Their new collaboration feels like an event. The show’s emotional impact smoulders from the very first scene, as Rashan Stone’s lawyer, Andersen, visits the Captain’s widow, Helena (Victoria Smurfitt), to discuss arrangements for a new children’s home to be funded by his legacy. The professional atmosphere rapidly dissolves in the face of their unresolved relationship as old lovers. Callum Scott Howells, a force of nature as Helena’s deeply troubled son Oz, arrives on the scene to confront the older generation with the consequences of their silence. His burgeoning relationship with the Captain’s unacknowledged daughter Reggie (Patricia Allison) is both sweet and real, and deeply troubling as they discover they are half-siblings. Meanwhile, her non-biological father, Jacob (Deka Walmsley), is from a different social world, from where he can see exactly how poisonous a situation she is in.

Owen’s rewrite is masterful, pulling the play from its 19th century setting and refocusing on the human relationships that make it powerful and current. The lurking threat of syphilis, which no longer makes sense, is removed making space to dive into the realities of a coercive relationship, the corrosive power relationships created by wealth, and the terrible dilemma of discovering you are closely related to your lover. Ghosts is brilliantly cast. Victoria Smurfit, making a rare and welcome stage appearance, is perfect as a woman struggling with her inability to speak out against her abuser. She switches between full insight and reversion to the language of the oppressor. Her relationship with her son, Oz, is at the centre of the play. Callum Scott Howells is Gen Z to the core in bleached hair and Adidas tracksuit bottoms, his emotions always on the surface. He hides nothing, but being open to his feelings of rejection does not make them easier to bear. The generational gap with his mother, who hid everything to protect him, comes to a head in a scene reminiscent of Gertrude and Hamlet, where he questions her about whether she was raped. It draws gasps from the audience, as do several scenes during the evening.

Rashan Stone’s Anderson is a much more sympathetic character than his original, the hypocritical Pastor Manders. He gives a deeply human performance as a man trying hard to do the right thing, and finding there are no good choices. Patricia Allison’s Reggie is spiky, and fully aware of how much she has to lose while Deka Walmsley, as her father, is also more sympathetic than Ibsens’ original, using what little power he has to protect his daughter. Jacob, a painter-decorator with a broad East Anglian accent, emphasises the social gulf between the wealthy, living in coastal luxury, and those who work for them, who have very few options.

Ghosts is a significant achievement, a fresh look at a classic which shows us just how powerful Ibsen’s writing can be. Gary Owen turns our attention to themes easily obscured by the differences between eras. His version includes a powerful, entirely real evocation of Anderson’s lifelong, unrequited love for Helena. It draws on the power of public image, with the children’s home destroyed by the threat of toxic press coverage, rather than burning down, as in the original. He explores, in excruciating detail, how parents come to emotionally damage their children. And he gives a sophisticated, convicing analysis of the insidious ways a coercive relationship isolates and destroys a woman. Ghosts is a gripping, beautifully acted show, driven by a creative vision that brings this 150-year-old play pulsatingly to life.