Ghosts, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ★★★★★

In the candlelit confines of the Sam Wanamaker playhouse, we're brought right into the wretched private lives of those left picking up the pieces in Ibsen’s Ghosts. In Joe Hill-Gibbins’ clear and urgent production, their unhappiness is palpable, their bitterness worn in every glance, step or touch. Candles are lit at the beginning, illuminating the characters’ intimacies for an intense 100 minutes, then snuffed out at the end in an on-the-nose reminder of their inescapable fates.

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Designer Rosanna Vize’s simple but impactful stage design complements Hill-Gibbins’ abstract production: the stage floor is carpeted with a vulgar red shag-pile rug – a visual expression of the lust and inherited complications that ravage the play. Behind the stage, an entirely mirrored wall reflects the truths its characters struggle to speak. It’s especially effective when Father Manders (a threateningly persuasive Paul Hilton) engages Helene Alving (Hattie Morahan, deeply in tune with her character’s plight) in a passionate clinch while claiming he’s only ever seen her as another man’s wife.

Ghosts: Stuart Thompson as Osvald Alving and Hattie Morahan as Helene Alving. Photo: Marc Brenner

In a production that makes the play’s 150-year-old dilemmas feel current, several scenes stand out. Stuart Thompson’s effeminate Osvald Alving, dressed like Harry Styles in a floral cardigan and necklace, is as convincing arguing the validity of different models of family as he is telling his doting mother Helene about the shameful sickness that’s brought him home from his life as an artist in Paris – a scene acted delicately between them.

Greg Hicks as Jacob Engstrand exudes his character’s crooked, slippery nature both in the early scene that sees him attempt to convince his daughter Regine (Sarah Slimani, quietly determined) to leave her work at the orphanage to help run his seedy hostel for seafarers, and as he plays the martyr to Father Manders (as he's called here) over the burning down of the orphanage.

Ghosts :Sarah Slimani as Regine Engstrand and Greg Hicks as Engstrand. Photo: Marc Brenner

Regine’s anguish at discovering she was forced into a life of servitude by Helene, instead of being brought up as her daughter, is a slow-building, devastating blow.

The deceased Captain Alving is the architect of all their problems and in Hill-Gibbins’ production, the power of ghosts to infect and stifle the lives of the living is keenly felt. In having the five characters on stage most of the time – and Osvald for all of it – we understand how trapped and helpless they feel.

This is no cosy Christmas ghost story, it's an icky family drama and a masterly revival, convincingly performed.