Ghosts

Ibsen, that most modern (for his time) playwright of poetic perfection, is somehow made to seem outdated and melodramatic in this poorly realised production full of altered text and linguistic anachronisms.

It’s all the more disappointing because Shaun Gorton’s stunning set, decaying at the edges and with warped floorboards, promises much. Yet even that is anachronistic. A very contemporary wall of glass with a glass front door may provide an excellent backdrop for the continual rain screen, but it simply wouldn’t exist in the bitter cold of the frozen countryside of Norway, where the sun rarely shines. I surmise that the director wanted a look which bridged the past with the present. After all, the play, with its themes of guilt, STD, incest, emotional abuse and repressed passion was shocking in its time, but still pertinent today. That doesn’t explain Ms Edwards liberties with the text (till one remembers that she made cuts to lyrics in her direction of the musical Gypsy which undermined subtle character development). Subtlety, it seems, is not the director’s forte; and so the nuances and undercurrents of a beautifully structured play are forsaken for loud declamation without insight. Moreover, reducing a three act play to one 90 minute act means that the play isn’t allowed to breathe, subtext is strangled, and what remains is exposition.

Philip Quast, that most charming of actors, is totally charmless as Pastor Manders. There is no seething repressed passion here, no inner struggle, merely bombastic pomposity, unbalanced by any redeemable qualities. One cannot imagine that Helene Alving (Linda Cropper) could ever have seen anything attractive in this man. We should understand that there is another man inside Manders, desperate for freedom and expression, yet strangled by convention…but we don’t. The result is that we care nothing for the character…in fact we care nothing for any of the characters. Ibsen wanted us to see the ugliness of the middle-classes, but not to the exclusion of anything resembling flesh and blood human beings.

Cropper is a fine actress, but the inconsistency of her character undercuts the confronting final scene to the point where emotional response is non-existent. Ben Pfeiffer as the syphilis ridden son, Oswald, comes closest to being a fully realised character, but even his attempts to reign in the histrionics and present something more subtextual lose out to the melodrama time and time again. Pip Edwards’ Regina teeters between the stylised and the contemporary and the ever-effective Richard Piper fares best as her father, the despicable Jacob Engstrand; that in itself is another anachronism, since Engstrand is the least complex character in the play, and yet the most convincing. However, when he declaims the Edwards penned line, “What a f**k-up” the fourth wall came tumbling down as credibility flew out the window.

It is sad that this production (which promised so much) seems to fail on all fronts, even destroying Ibsen’s language. What should have been a multi-layered feast ended up more like a storm (or is that a Gale?) in a teacup.

Coral Drouyn

Image: Linda Cropper (Mrs Alving), Pip Edwards (Regina) and Philip Quast (Pastor Manders). Photo © Jeff Busby.