You can't beat Henrik Ibsen. He is, after Shakespeare, the greatest of all dramatists. And, even if Robin Phillips's new production of Ghosts does not erase my haunting memories of Katie Mitchell's and David Thacker's versions, it still dignifies the West End and offers a decidedly upmarket replacement to Under the Doctor.
Since it is staged at the Comedy, I could wish for more relish for Ibsen's implacable irony. His theme, after all, is the need to shed dead ideas and moral conventions. Yet his characters can never quite escape the tenacious past. Mrs Alving, the apostle of enlightenment, finally shrinks from assisting the syphilitic Oswald in an act of merciful euthanasia. The servant Regina, informed that she is Oswald's half-sister, promptly cuts and runs. And Pastor Manders, the embodiment of rectitude, is conned into supporting Engstrand's plan for a maritime bordello. Ibsen is often thought of as grim; in fact, he is drama's supreme ironist.
A little more of his wicked humour would not hurt in Phillips's austerely romantic production. Paul Farnsworth's set, with its large angled mirror, is elegantly hermetic but gives little sense of the way climate affects character. Big moments, such as Mrs Alving's realisation that "there are as many ghosts as grains of sand", are lent a gratuitous portentousness by the use of an echo-chamber effect. And, while Richard Harris's new version is sprightly enough, it misses - unless I misheard - Pastor Manders's great cry, after the burning of the orphanage: "And not insured either!"
But the performances are all decent, and in one or two cases, something more. Francesca Annis's Mrs Alving could do more to suggest a woman intellectually inflamed by new radical ideas. Where she does score is in her recollected revulsion at nursing her diseased husband so that when she tells Manders "I did everything" the lines acquire an extraordinary sexual charge. Anthony Andrews's excellent Manders also combines a poker-backed rigidity with hints of a fiercely repressed sensuality. You feel he is always fighting his own rising desire not only for Mrs Alving but for the provocatively obliging Regina.
And Robin Soans is the creepiest Engstrand I can recall. To Manders he is full of sanctimonious piety. But left alone with his supposed daughter, Regina, he becomes a reptilian pimp; when he talks of "a father's guiding hand" he places it unequivocally on her breast. Sarah Tansey's Regina reacts with proper disgust but also conveys the character's inherited hedonism while Martin Hutson's Oswald movingly portrays the character's progressive deterioration. Maybe there is something melodramatic about Oswald's final collapse. But the play still shows Ibsen to be an intellectual visionary. Desmond MacCarthy, reviewing Ghosts in 1917, called Ibsen "the dramatist of the future". Seeing it revived now, what is shocking is its perpetual relevance to the present.
Until June 23. Box office: 020-7369 1731. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
