'Ghosts' review — you can't tear your eyes away from this vivid retelling of Ibsen which ratchets up the incest

Read our review of Ghosts, starring Callum Scott Howells, Victoria Smurfit and Patricia Allison, now in performances at the Lyric Hammersmith to 10 May.

Though our sensibilities have mellowed in the almost 150 years since Ibsen’s Ghosts sparked an outcry over its candidness around venereal diseases and euthanasia, it’s reassuring to know our squeamish disapproval of incest is still very much intact. The relationship between half-siblings Oswald (here Oz) and Regina (now Reggie) is ratcheted up in playwright Gary Owen’s ruminative retelling of the Norwegian-Danish classic, which shifts the story to an unspoken seaside location in roughly contemporary Britain, and reunites him with his frequent collaborator, director Rachel O’Riordan.

The vision of this reworking is always vivid but it sometimes struggles to hit the mark. Like a game of darts, its arrows skirt the impactful bullseye, hitting the surrounding rings marked ‘high comedy’ and ‘melodrama’. But Owen and O’Riordan deliver a production you can’t tear your eyes from, as much as you want to at times. And watching It’s a Sin’s Callum Scott Howells (who was also superb in Owen and O’Riordan’s Romeo and Julie) sulk and flounce as irritable actor Oz, opposite Rivals’ Victoria Smurfit as his icily bullish mother Helena, is indeed very funny.

Ghosts is a play about morality and a musing on our collective, crooked interest in prioritising a healthy public image over personal, private good health. Though we learn Oz’s father, Carl, has died of cancer, the sickness Helena fears Oz will inherit here is a mental one: a violent, pumped-up misogyny that may encourage him to bully and rape women, like we later learn his father did.

There’s more than a whiff of the Sackler legacy to plans to strip the children’s hospital Helena is funding of her late husband’s name, following the posthumous sullying of his reputation, but not his money. Meanwhile, references to having therapy, setting boundaries, lived experiences and Pornhub niches all serve as a reminder that while the terminology and means have shifted, fumbling to strike a healthy balance in our relationships – with ourselves and others – remains relatable territory.

Though this interpretation succeeds in becoming a story for the present, it struggles tonally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the glut of incest narratives to land on the London stage in the past six months – see also The Other Place and double whammy of Oedipuses – it’s that when the guilty parties get down to it, audiences will gasp then snigger, loudly. Oz and Reggie’s (Patricia Allison) icky intimacy is also met with laughs. And though it gets there eventually, the chemistry between Smurfit’s Helena and Rhashan Stone’s level-headed Andersen (a lawyer not a pastor here) takes a while to warm up.

There’s also a tendency for it to slip into melodrama: twice in the first half, Smurfit slides down the wall under a threat of a man’s rage, and though this neatly anticipates her later contradictory views on whether to speak up or shut up in the face of abuse, the move has less impact the second time around.

Still, the play amusingly plucks off and chews over many tendrils of morality. Whether it’s nurturing a class divide between two half-siblings living under one roof, or putting desire above the conventions of family, it asks: if no one can see you do it, is it even a problem? Merle Hensel’s set visually facilitates this turning a blind eye, cloaking the rear of the stage in a thick sea mist that obscures a back wall mirror, preventing these characters from seeing themselves truly.

Ghosts is at the Lyric Hammersmith to 10 May. Book Ghosts tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Ghosts (Photos by Helen Murray)