GHOSTS
Gate Theatre, London W11
Opened 11 January, 2007
****
The Gate is renowned for reinventing its tiny performance space for
each production, but even by these standards it seems an egregiously
bonkers idea to build a full three-walled box set (on a revolve!),
leaving a playing area of less than three metres in each direction.
However, Lez Brotherston's pine-walled Scandic cabin with its
permanently rainy windows gives physical form to the claustrophobia
which pervades Ibsen's 1881 play and Anna Mackmin's excellent
production. As the Alving family grapple with incest, arson, blackmail
and hereditary syphilis in small-town Norway, they encounter time and
again the suffocating priggishness and concern for appearances and
bourgeois proprieties personified by Pastor Manders (Finbar Lynch,
unusually young for the role but already thoroughly buttoned-up). As
the social and moral requirements invoked by the Pastor leave Mrs
Alving no room to move, nor does the set: it is barely possible to fit
one chair and a stool between the piles of dangerously liberal books
piled against the Alvings' walls.
Mackmin eschews the temptation to make either Mrs Alving or her son
Osvald demonstratively fervent in their resistance to this unyielding
orthodoxy. Both Niamh Cusack and Christian Coulson base their
characters' contrariness on reason rather than passion. These are no
banner-waving champions of free thought, nor rocks of quiet but
palpable determination; they are simply people whose experiences have
persuaded them that their course is as valid as any diktat from the
pulpit.
The work of actors and director is grounded in Amelia Bullmore's new
version of the text. This is as unadorned as the set (she trims the
three-act play to 95 minutes without interval), and forthright enough
for Osvald to say in as many words, for the first time in any
translation I have known, "I have syphilis". Bullmore also solves the
problem which has bedevilled all other recent productions of the play I
have seen: how to stop a contemporary audience responding with a
postmodern excess of irony which trivialises the events portrayed. We
still laugh in derision at the Pastor's sententiousness, but he is not
a mere pompous clown here, nor yet a morally growling ogre. I have long
felt instinctively that this is Ibsen's greatest play, without entirely
knowing why; this masterly new version and magnificently stifled
production give new strength to my conviction. It is his most fully
human tragedy.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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