If you want to give a modern-day spin to Ibsen’s drama about past indiscretions weighing on the present, you’re going to have to do something about the syphilis. In 2015, a story about a philandering father may have a gossipy attraction, but isn’t shocking in the way it was when the play debuted in 1882. Back then, the passing of an STD to an unborn son seemed the height of irresponsibility; today, it just seems avoidable.
That’s why playwright Megan Barker ditches that storyline in her new version of the play. Instead, she touches a 21st-century nerve by placing the Alving family and their cronies in the era of Jimmy Savile. As before, the characters are outwardly respectable judges, MPs and businesspeople, but now they are complicit in the suppression of a story of institutional child abuse. As far as the dead father was concerned, Alving House, the orphanage to which Alison Peebles’ Helen Alving has dedicated the family fortune, was a “fuck farm”. His activities were known, but everyone had an interest in keeping quiet about them.
In a grim echo of police attitudes at the time of the Rotherham child sex-abuse scandal, Laurie Ventry’s Martin Manders, a power-hungry local MP, even tries to blame the victims. “She certainly would not have been an innocent,” he says of one of them.
It makes you wonder what secrets are contained in the shredded paper forming the snowdrifts outside the split-level kitchen of Neil Warmington’s set, and what lies in the murky off-stage corners that lighting designer Sergey Jakovsky seems determined to illuminate.
It’s unsettling stuff, even if it overloads the play with backstory and pushes it towards melodrama. In Andy Arnold’s rather static production, the character relationships are underdeveloped, making you wonder if Barker would have been less constrained by writing an original piece on this subject.
- At Tron theatre, Glasgow, until 24 October. Box office: 0141-552 4267 .
