Last Updated on January 23, 2025

Ibsen by candlelight

The opening show of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 10th Anniversary Season is Ghosts, the Globe’s first-ever production of a play by Henrik Ibsen. It is entirely fitting that this eerie study of how the past informs the present should be performed on the venue’s atmospheric and intimate candlelit indoor stage.

Adapted and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, this psychologically fascinating play peels away layers of intergenerational trauma and the effects of powerful societal norms. The strong cast is led by Hattie Morahan as Helene Alving with support from Paul Hilton as Father Manders, Greg Hicks as Jacob Engstrand, Sarah Slimani as Regine Engstrand and Stuart Thompson as Osvald Alving.

We’re in Norway in the 1880s. It’s dark. Religion is still a matter of desperate importance but very few people are living by its moral rules. Shame abounds, alcohol has a stranglehold, and women are denounced as fallen women when it is predatory men who are guilty.

Carpenter Engstrand and his daughter Regine, housemaid at the Alving house, argue and set the scene as they light the theatre’s candelabras at the start of the play. Darkness and fire are recurring themes and the candles are put to their full dramatic use in this production. Mrs Alving’s artist son Oswald constantly bemoans the darkness, gloom, and lack of light in Norway. There is not a single artificial light used in this production so we are in a fittingly moody gloom throughout.

It is the night before the opening of a new children’s home dedicated to the memory of Captain Alving. He has been dead for ten years and his widow Helene wishes to use the home to bolster his reputation for posterity. And then she wants to forget everything about him. A supposed pillar of rectitude in the community, Alving was in reality a dissolute drunk, a cheat, a liar and a truly terrible husband. This must be kept secret. 

As Helene, Hattie Morahan is expertly coiled and full of tension. On the one hand, her character is modern, strong, a good businesswoman, and a protector of her family’s reputation. On the other, she is about to come undone, burdened by lies and the presentiments of the past. “There are ghosts everywhere. There are ghosts here right now,” she says chillingly when past and present start to collide.

This production uses the humour in the characters’ own words and actions to mock their hypocrisy. In no other character is this more marked than in Father Manders. Paul Hilton pinpoints and skewers the absurdity and petulance of this controlling man, obsessed by appearances and scandal. He disastrously persuades Mrs Alving to agree not to insure the orphanage in case powerful people take offence and view him as lacking in faith in God to protect the building.

When Ghosts was first performed in London in the 1890s its themes – including congenital syphilis, incest, euthanasia, and sexual desire – were scandalous. The Telegraph’s reviewer described it as “An open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged” while the Standard called it “Unutterably offensive”. Now such themes have lost their power to shock but we can still understand them in their historical context. Ghosts remains resonant today but for different reasons. What this take on the play provokes is a sense of how easy it can be to waste one’s time on this earth – in this case, lives are not lived fully nor with joy, mainly to protect the reputation of a man who did not deserve to be honoured. There is great danger it transpires in keeping up appearances and hiding the truth – the ghosts from the past will always come back to haunt us.

Uncomfortable laughter is twinned with alarm as the predicaments of the characters become increasingly apparent. The play unfolds at a fast-moving 95 minutes without an interval and the acting is uniformly compelling. Ghosts makes for a thought-provoking watch.

www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/ghosts-2023

Ghosts is running at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe until 28 January 2024

Ghosts
21 New Globe Walk
Bankside
London SE1 9DT