The ghosts nestle, rustle, pinch and pierce the psychology of the five characters. Terror brushes across the face of Helene, wealthy wife and mother, as she catches the noise of her son giggling softly with the maid, a shuddering reminiscence of her husband’s adulterous behaviour. The son, dying of syphilis, is hastened on his way as his mother reveals that the maid, Regina, is his half-sister. Pastor Manders may have ignited the fire that consumed the new orphanage erected to celebrate the memory of Helene’s husband.
This is not melodrama. Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s play, in fresh language, is subtle, taut and completely absorbing. The text is full, but played without an interval it drives relentlessly through the emotional tissue of the play’s characters. Lesley Manville’s Helene, the centre of the play, is utterly believable as she reveals her own and the other characters’ secrets and repressed memories and hopes.
Hiding and revelation are built into the beautifully conceived and constructed set, in which firm, enclosing walls fade into opacity and then translucence. Snow and rain give way to pale dawn. Stately, bourgeois surroundings are shown to enclose desire, anguish, brief moments of joy and of understanding.
The pace is everything. The inexorable bass notes and deep rhythms of the play are given shape by the different characters, in time with each other, then suddenly out of time, jarring us into awareness of a new emotional revelation. The rhythms merge and part, crossing more and more fiercely as the play builds to its climax, followed by a dying fall, that lets us out into the night. The faces of the actors at the curtain call were marked by the effort of creating and inhabiting the highly charged world of Ibsen’s Ghosts.