When Henrik Ibsen published Ghosts in 1881 – plays then were often released as texts with no production scheduled – the content (sexual transgression, venereal disease, suicide) so shocked many booksellers that they banned it. The book was reviewed in newspapers but with such fury that no Norwegian theatre would stage it; Chicago hosted the world premiere the following year. The playwright was so shaken that he wrote a great drama about ostracism,An Enemy of the People.
Almost a century and a half later, and with anything going in most areas of life, it’s tough for a modern production to still deliver a Ghosts spooked by taboos. But Rachel O’Riordan’s staging of Gary Owen’s new version achieves it.
“Complete silence would, in our opinion, be the most fitting reception for this work,” said one late 19th-century media critique. Turning this into a compliment, the 2025 theatre was filled with intense attention, broken by loud gasps at plot twists and laughter for dark jokes implicit in the original but spoken louder here.
Owen and O’Riordan memorably relocated Euripides to modern Cardiff inIphigenia in Splottand similarly update Ghosts. Helen Alving becomes Helena, still the guilt-haunted widow of a local hero, though honouring him not with an orphanage but a hospital funded by private equity. Her troubled artist son, Oswald, turns into Oz, an actor short on auditions. The Alving’s maid, Regina, and carpenter father, Jacob, retain their relationship and roles, though she goes by Reggie. In the most striking modernisation, Pastor Manders, the creepy priest, becomes an agnostic management consultant, Andersen, whose church is Zoom and his bible workplace guidelines.
The original contains (1881 plot-spoiler) a strand about assisted dying that is hotly topical now. Owen boldly jettisons that and the VD theme but still constructs a shocking plot around guilt, consent and, drawing audible shock, a plot line overlapping with season three of HBO’sThe White Lotus. The play’s theme of terrible familial and social inheritance survives in jagged dialogue that gives “home” and “safe” dark new meanings.
Ghosts exemplifies Ibsen’s creed that the key events of a play take place before it starts: everyone is either hiding, or having hidden, something from them. The actors grippingly chart the negotiation of these secrets and suspicions. Victoria Smurfit’s Helena shows how the greater agency of a modern Mrs Alving has not prevented moral compromises but also allows her contemporary solutions. Callum Scott Howells as Oz is sassy, sarcastic but ecstatic at the prospect even of dangerous love. Patricia Allison’s confident, rebellious Reggie movingly becomes the story’s core of common decency. Rhashan Stone plausibly makes a corporate fixer the equivalent of a sanctimonious cleric and Deka Walmsley’s Jacob trails the exhaustion of a man who has kept quiet to survive.
Crucially, this Ghosts, retaining the toxic power of the original, will grip whether you know the play or don’t.
At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 10 May