Cathy Marston has skirted around literature in several of her works - Sophie's Choice, The Tempest, the private life of TS Eliot - but Ghosts is the first full text she has tried to choreograph. Ibsen's drama is a big, wordy challenge. Yet in trying to solve the problems she has set herself, Marston has forced a big jump forward in her own career.
Most obviously, she has had to think with impressive clarity about structure. To capture the play's harrowing dialogue between past and present, she has split Mrs Alving into a younger and older self. As the two dancers portraying the character haunt and interrogate each other, the action slips easily between today and days gone by. In their increasingly frantic duets we see writ large the dilemma Mrs Alving suffers as the ghost of her syphilitic husband is revived in her son, Oswald.
The doubling motif runs throughout. While Captain Alving seduces the maid, Johanna, his wife on the other side of the stage is begging Pastor Manders to help her escape the marriage. When Mrs Alving enters, heavily pregnant with Oswald, Johanna enters, cradling her own swollen belly. When the Captain's corpse is laid out on a table, Oswald lies slumped in a trance, already showing signs of his father's illness.
This device never becomes heavy-handed because Marston and her superb cast portray the characters in such vivid physical and moral detail. Christopher Akrill's Captain is slack and blurry with drink, yet his predatory duet with Johanna and his savagely intent encounter with his wife show that he is still capable of doing vicious damage. Matthew Hart's Oswald starts out supple and boyishly open-faced, yet his dancing already has a needy, gluey quality that foreshadows his impending disintegration.
Above the characters, video images of rain-spattered water, furrowed ice and cold night skies intensify the atmosphere of claustrophobia and doom. But it is these two qualities that are also the work's downfall. Ibsen is never fun, but there is energy and passion in his dialogue; by taking away his words, Marston emphases Ghosts' dourness. Nor is she helped by Dave Maric's monochrome score. The cumulative effect, fatally, is to disengage us from Mrs Alving and her appalling plight. In the end, she can't take so much relentless anguish - and neither can we.
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