Ghosts – Lyric Hammersmith, London

Writer: Henrik Ibsen, in a new version by Gary Owen

Director: Rachel O’Riordan

Henrik Ibsen was never happy with the English title of his play Gengangere. In its native Danish, the title is closer to “Revenants”, suggesting ones who return rather more than Ghosts did.

That hasn’t stopped the play’s popularity in its English language version, of course. Its tale of a widow trying to escape the legacy of her cruel late husband and finding his presence infecting her life and that of their son in myriad ways speaks to us even when presented in its original 19th-century Scandinavian form.

This new production, by playwright Gary Owen, modernises the setting and the language. Ibsen’s protagonist, Helen, becomes Helena (Victoria Smurfit), a wealthy widow (of “the Captain”) somewhere in the south west of England, living in a glass and concrete brutalist mansion perpetually surrounded by fog. She is donating her husband’s money to build a children’s hospital nearby. One of the trustees, Rhashan Stone’s Andersen – an old flame of Helena’s who replaces the pastor in Ibsen’s original – is expressing concerns about the connections to someone of her husband’s reputation.

To a certain extent, this modernisation still hews pretty closely to the original play’s structure. True, Deka Walmsley’s Jacob, whose daughter Reggie (Patricia Allison) works as Helena’s PA/maid/housekeeper, wants to buy holiday lets rather than a hostel for seafarers, but otherwise the transposition of Scandi noir to south coast gloom proceeds fairly smoothly.

Perhaps the earliest big change in director Rachel O’Riordan’s staging is with Helena’s son, here called Oz. Callum Scott Howells portrays the lad, here a struggling actor who’s returned home from London until he gets another audition, as a knowingly self-involved drama queen. It’s a brilliant tour de force from Howells, bringing an air of unpredictability, comedy and danger wherever he goes.

Indeed, Howells’s characterisation feels so comfortable and at ease that it highlights how stilted Owen’s dialogue feels in the mouths of most of the other characters. Stone, in particular, feels detached from his character’s words, but Allison and Smurfit also exhibit that quality from time to time. It’s as if the cast were told to play detached and aloof to match the occasionally overwritten, unrealistic dialogue, only for Howells to blast his way through.

This all takes place on a deceptively simple set by Merle Hensel. Ostensibly a concrete cube, the back wall keeps a bank of fog at bay, out of which some characters loom at opportune moments. The textured walls of the room comprise blocks adorned with various pictures of the back of a man’s head, presumably signifying Helena’s late husband: he may not be looking down on them, the set suggests, but even though he has gone away, he remains present.

In the second act, Owen takes some big swings, revising the structure as well as the dialogue of Ibsen’s original. The revelation that Reggie, whom Oz has just started seeing romantically, had the same father is revealed to the pair much earlier. This becomes the backbone of the “sins of the father” narrative, which originally dwelt on the suggestion that Oswald inherited syphilis. Tales of the Captain’s brutal attitude to women suggest that Oz, having been witness to some of his behaviour, has inherited not a disease, but a taste for depravity and control of the women in his life.

An extended scene between Smurfit and Howells – the latter largely dropping the comedically effete side to his character, the former warming up as she confronts her perceived failings as a mother – treads some modern paths, the conversation from victim shaming to coercive control, while never really saying anything new or special. It also heads into some taboo-busting areas, just as Ibsen’s original play did when first performed. Oz’s attitude to discovering that he has slept with his half-sister, though, feels like a taboo that really didn’t need to be busted at all.

Smurfit does come into her own throughout the piece. Starting as a near caricature of a wealthy woman using patronage to further her place in society, as the layers slough off from her, we see a woman who found a way of surviving through the horrors of a marriage that distorted the souls of both her and her son.

That much, at least, is a common strength between Ibsen’s original and Owen’s retooled version. The ghosts of the title are still revenants; whether it is the omnipresent memory of a man reviled or, in his son, the spectre that his psyche is still here, this new adaptation retains at least that spark of dread nearly 150 years later.

Continues until 10 May 2025