★★☆☆☆
Two Stars
In Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, a young girl lies on her deathbed, bright red hair jarring with her greyish pallor. It is a portrait of a memory – of Munch’s sister, who died when she was fifteen and he was thirteen. Munch became obsessed with this image, producing six versions of the very same scene. It is almost as if he recognised the hold the past had over the living, transforming his sister into his own personal ghost, a dead figure who haunted him even in the act of creation.
It is not surprising then that Ibsen’s Ghosts held such resonance for him. It is a dead character whose presence is felt most keenly in the play, and whose past taints those left behind. Munch designed the set for a 1906 Berlin production, but the drawings appear as personal pictorial responses to the play rather than design. The Alvings’ living-room is intimate, bordering on claustrophobic. A hard black armchair, owned by Munch’s violent father, dominates the foreground, but stands suggestively half turned away from us. Echoes appear in the compression of stiff black figures, bent inwards by the walls and ceiling pressing down on them.
Translated onto stage, this becomes a very different picture. In his Munch-inspired production, Stephen Unwin’s set is backed by a wide screen projecting endless rain, transforming the natural elements into a force that invades the Alvings’ home. But this extension into the outside world heightens the stage’s natural breadth, and all claustrophobia is lost. The domineering black chair is shoved into the background, registering only the vaguest hint of menace. More predictably, the gaze of the dead Captain Alving burdens the characters on set, as he surveys them impassively from his portrait. The threat of despair is still present – but less radically and subtly so than in Munch’s vision.
Overall the production fails to provide any new insight into the play, and is stuck in fussy convention. The play’s turning point, as Mrs Alving’s orphanage is burnt down, catalyses no genuine shock or despair, but rather a flurry of sartorial activity. Hats are demanded for, women cocooned in elaborate shawls, and only after this prolonged hassle does anyone venture outside towards the disaster.
Characters also end up as dated caricature. Patrick Drury plays Pastor Manders with exaggerated tightness, motionless from the neck down and jumping away at the merest approach of a female. Manders is a complicated figure to bring across in the 21st century – the moral norm of Ibsen’s time, his beliefs are now comically priggish, dogmatic and self-serving. Drury adds nothing to this unsympathetic exterior. Ultimately we can only laugh disbelievingly at him, never considering him to be as trapped in lies and self-deceit as those he condemns.
Florence Hall as Regina and Pip Donaghy as Jacob are similarly affected, a strange conglomeration of Scottish and Northern accents playing havoc every time they speak. What kind of geographical or political point this is meant to establish remains extremely unclear. Hall’s entire emotional credibility is hampered, as the falsity of her voice overshadows the brittle fracturing of Regina’s bright exterior.
Mrs Alving should be the riveting centre of the play, a character entombed in the false life she has so assiduously created and fed to the public. Ibsen identified her as an older Nora from A Doll’s House, but one who never escaped, who never shut the door on husband and children. However Kelly Hunter overacts the tragedy of her character to absurd effect, filling each moment with extravagant gestures, preceding each word with a farcically long dramatic pause. As the play builds up towards its climax, Hunter’s technique to convey tension is simply to elongate these pauses. By the end she manages to reach a chant-like state, intoning her words with agonisingly exaggerated import. Coupled with the strange use of music – banally sentimental melody between scenes, one violently deafening chord at the end – any hint of subtlety at the characters’ fates is completely undermined.
All of which is a shame, as the one truly gripping presence throughout is Mark Quartley’s Oswald. From the moment he appears on stage, dragging himself around in a mixture of affected worldliness and real undisguisable physical and mental torture, Quartley embodies Oswald from within his feverish core. His split between vulnerability and repulsiveness inspires us to recoil from him, while at the same time overwhelming us with a shared sense of futile despair. Where he is silent, his contorted frame, wracked with inborn illness and shame, speaks volumes. This is a character who could have walked straight out of Munch’s pictures, and whose muted screams reach out of this dated production, right into the heart of modernity.
Ghosts was performed by the English Touring Theatre – see their website for more information about upcoming productions
