Writer: Henrik Ibsen (adapted by Richard Eyre)
Director: Kwame Owusu
Your late husband, Captain Alving, was a drunk and a womaniser whose malign influence led you to send your only son away to boarding school at the age of seven. Yet, anxious to preserve his reputation and maintain appearances, you feel obliged to dedicate an orphanage built in his memory.
This is the foundation of Ibsen’s coruscating 19th-century morality tale, an unflinching exploration of sexual hypocrisy, euthanasia, incest, venereal disease and a lack of faith that retains its chilling relevance today.
The widow Helene Alving (Flora Montgomery) is the central figure around whom the drama unfolds. On the eve of the orphanage’s opening, she receives a visit from the self-righteous Pastor Manders (Oliver Alvin-Wilson), who laments a society increasingly governed by desire rather than discipline. Her foppish son, Oswald Alving (Joe Pitts), recently returned from Paris, where he has been working as an artist, is in Manders’ eyes a prime example of this moral decline. Pitts gives Oswald a fragile brightness that makes Manders’ moralising feel all the more suffocating.
When the question of insuring the orphanage arises, Manders warns Helene that doing so would betray a lack of faith and invite social disapproval. “God and the law are the causes of all misery,” she declares.
Thus, the scene is set for an examination of the double standards, moral hypocrisy, and warped sense of duty underpinning respectable 19th-century society, and the devastating consequences for those forced to live by its rules.
Completing the household are Helene’s maid, Regina Engstrand (Cecilia Appiah), whose playful use of French phrases hints at her aspirations and her oleaginous father Jacob Engstrand, whose ambitions and manipulations further expose the moral compromises festering beneath the Alving estate.
Director Kwame Owusu draws out the play’s slow‑burn tension with precision, allowing each revelation to land with bruising clarity. Staged at the delightfully intimate Jermyn Street Theatre, the production makes effective use of a sparse wooden set that seems to absorb the light—a fitting visual metaphor for a play in which the past threatens to extinguish the hopes of the living.
The play’s title invites several interpretations: Captain Alving’s continuing influence from beyond the grave; the sins of the dead returning to haunt the living; or, perhaps, the lingering spectres of social conventions and inherited beliefs that refuse to die.
Rejected from many 19th‑century playhouses for its shocking content, Ghosts retains every bit of its original urgency in this production, proving just as vital and just as worth seeing today.
Runs until 14 November 2026
