Ghosts

by Henrik Ibsen

seen at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith on 19 April 2025

Rachel O'Riordan directs Gary Owen's modern adaptation of Ibsen's intense family drama, featuring Victoria Smurfit as Helena (Mrs Alving in the original), Callum Scott-Howells as her son Oz (Oswald Alving), Patricia Allison as Reggie (Regina Engstrand), Rhashan Stone as Andersen (Pastor Manders) and Deka Walmsley as Jacob (Engstrand) Regina's putative father.

O'Riordan and Owen have collaborated several times before, reworking or riffing on classics: they were responsible for the play Romeo and Julie which I saw in March 2023, and indeed Callum Scott-Howells featured as Romeo in that production.

Ghosts caused a scandal when it was written in 1881 as it dealt openly with the consequences of an apparently respectable but in fact disastrous marriage, leading to the son inheriting syphilis from his father. Gary Owen has re-cast this classic in a contemporary setting in which the widowed Helena is still proposing to invest her husband's fortune in creating a children's hospital, and there are still fateful secrets being hidden from Oz and Reggie, but the then shocking references to syphilis are here replaced by a gruelling reckoning with an abusive marriage.

Mother and son are at loggerheads as she has always seemed cold and unfeeling towards him while she has seen herself as protecting her son from his father. Helena and Andersen are longstanding friends who plainly once were lovers (in their university days) so there is plenty of room for tension between them too as Anderrsen, acting as the charitable trust's lawyer, attempts to shield it from reputational damage once he realises that accusations concerning the dead man's behaviour may explode into adverse publicity.

It's a cleverly thought out adaptation given a powerful boost by electrifying performances, particularly by Victoria Smurfit and Callum Scott-Howells. Helena has long monologues in which she tries to explain to both Andersen and to Oz (separately) the stultifying experience of living with an abusive partner and feeling unable to escape, while Oz is torn by powerful resentments and is desperate now to make something of the deep connection he feels with his childhood friend Reggie - all unaware that they have the same father. When confronted by this fact he is appalled to realise that he still "feels right" with Reggie, and there is a terrifying moment when he is on the verge of becoming as predatory as his father was, only prevented by Reggie's determination to walk away from the situation.

All takes place in a cavernous reception in the Alving house, with a vast window at the back through which nothing can be seen but fog. On the whole length and height of the walls are vast panelled photographs of the dead husband and father - but they are all shots only of the back of his head, an extremely disturbing image of his baleful control. This set design by Merle Hensel provides a stunning visual counterpart to the huge psychological damage Helena has suffered and has unwittingly passed on to those around her despite her best intentions. As Andersen ruefully remarks, in many situations of this sort the victim can inadvertently become complicit in damaging other people.

What I found particularly compelling in this production was that all the characters viewed the situation from a different perspective and yet it was completely believable that each point of view could seem justifiable. The speeches were often lengthy - far longer than would normally be encountered in ordinary dialogue - but the emotional weight of what was being said overrode any qualms about verbosity or artificiality. And there was so much passion in the delivery. At times Helena would visibly flinch and cower at what was being said to her, even though in many ways she was a steely character in her own right.

Productions of Ghosts adhering more closely to Ibsen's original text are still very powerful, but this re-working in contemporary terms is also fully justified.

Rhinoceros

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 April 2025

Omar Elerian directs Rhinoceros having translated and adapted it especially for this production, for which the set and costumes are designed by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita. It features Sopé Dìrisù as Berenger, Joshua McGuire as Jean, Anoushka Lucas as Daisy, Paul Hunter as the Narrator and Botard, and John Biddle, Hayley Carmichael, Sophie Steer and Alan Williams taking other parts.

Two major things are happening: a radical interrogation of theatrical experience, and a fantastical story set in a small town ("not in France", this Narrator insists, despite the French names of many of the characters) in which almost all the townspeople except the increasingly agitated Berenger turn into rhinoceroses. The stage is bare and white, with a rostrum in the middle and a raised platform at the back (luckily with steps down to the main acting area), and a table on either side each holding a variety of implements used by the cast to create sound effects. The Narrator, having begun with a welcome to the audience and a warm-up session in which we are encouraged to follow his gestures at first in real time, and then one gesture behind his, and then two (by which time almost everyone is relaxed, amused and confused), then sets the scenes, helping the actors as much as the audience to visualise where they are. He frequently reads all the stage directions as well.

With all this business to distract us, the sheer implausibility of the transformations can be smuggled past us, especially as the first appearance (or rather drumming sound) of a rhinoceros is not connected with any claim that it was once a person. What we are first concentrating on is the rather prickly friendship of two very different people - the uptight Berenger and the laid-back Jean. Later there is an increasingly chaotic scene in an office one Monday morning: there are more rhinoceroses roaming by then, and it transpires that one of them is one of the office workers, whom the manager had assumed was merely malingering.

By this time, the visual style of the production, the painstaking reading out of stage directions, the occasionally hesitant and often inappropriate attempts of the cast to enact the directions, and the weird progression of events, have conspired to make for much hilarity, but in the second half, when Berenger visits Jean to apologise for creating bad feelings between them, we witness (so far as is possible) Jean's own transformation, a superb piece of physical acting by Joshua McGuire, and later we the audience are conscripted into providing an unpleasant sound effect (by following the Narrator's gestures again) when Berenger baulks at slapping his girlfriend Daisy. Many in the audience had been provided with kazoos during the interval: they too had become rhinoceroses. By the end of the play, only Berenger is proclaiming his determination to resist the communal transformation, desperately shouting his resistance while the others take the curtain call. What seemed like an absurdist joke has become a disquieting examination of herd mentality and dehumanisation: no wonder the play was seen as a commentary on French collaboration during the Vichy years.

The jokiness of the visual style, and the commitment of the cast to taking their predicament seriously, means that there is very little overt preaching or too-obvious allegorising in the production, leaving us to find whatever messages we want in the undercurrents of a play by turns hilarious and worrying.

Playhouse Creatures

by April De Angelis

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 10 April 2025

When the official London theatres re-opened in the 1660s after an 18-year hiatus acting skills and traditions had been lost and there were no trained boys to take on the female roles as they had done in Shakespeare's and Jonson's days. For the first time women were on stage professionally, but it was not without controversy and what we would now call trolling.

Playhouse Creatures concerns five such actresses, the unimpeachable Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor), married to the important theatrical manager Thomas Betterton, Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), Doll Common (Doña Croll) and of course the up-and-coming Nell Gwyn (Zoe Brough). The title "Mrs" was a sop to respectability, and did not necessarily imply the presence or even existence of a corresponding "Mr", while Doll Common was actually Katherine Corey, forever associated with a part she played in Jonson's The Alchemist.

April De Angelis has created a play examining the highs and lows of these women's experiences, including some amusing pastiches of the kinds of roles for which they became famous - there was always an element of ogling involved on the part of the audience, not to say outright harassment, and though actresses could be taken up by aristocrats and even the King, they could also be dropped and vilified. The play covers all these eventualities in episodes mostly based on historical fact (though there were actually two Marshall sisters).

The play seems to be the dream reminiscence of Doll Common, portrayed here more as a wardrobe mistress and long-term confidante of Mrs Betterton than as an actress in her own right. The irrepressible Nell bursts into the lives of the others with blithe insouciance and an astonishingly resilient self-belief. Mrs Fawley is not so lucky, her career effectively destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy. No amount of sisterly sympathy can overcome the social disgrace once Mrs Fawley quails at the awful realities of an abortion (in the intimacy of the Orange Tree I suspect most of the audience was relieved that she called a halt to proceedings after the first probe proved too much to endure).

Here directed by Michael Oakley, the Orange Tree stage is used to excellent effect as principally a backstage space where the actresses can confer, advise and support one another. The rowdy audiences are just noises off, and a dialogue between Mrs Betterton and her husband, in which she puts the case for actresses owning shares in their company, is all the more poignant for us hearing only one side of the conversation: this as much as anything reminds us that the women's world was totally circumscribed by male power just out of sight.

The Merchant of Venice (1936)

by William Shakespeare (adapted by Brigid Armour and Tracey-Ann Oberman)

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 9 April 2025

The most problematic aspects to modern eyes of The Merchant of Venice - its racism and anti-semitism - are confronted boldly in this re-imagining of the play set in London's East End in 1936 as the Jewish community there faced the increasing activism of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The director Brigid Armour and the "first female Shylock" Tracy-Ann Oberman have adjusted and streamlined the play to fit this tense time not far out of living memory, and in doing so have shone a disturbing light on the play and the period.

In front of a backdrop representing the terraced house fronts of a typical East End street the play opens with a Passover supper celebrated by Shylock and her family and friends, with daughter Jessica asking the time-honoured questions (usually it is the youngest male child who performs this task, but none is present). It is interrupted by the first shouts of the baying mob, and then Shakespeare's text takes over with Antonio's world-weariness, his friends' easy badinage and Bassanio's importunity. For Portia's scenes a white gauze curtain is drawn across the back of the stage lending an insubstantial air to the setting of Belmont, but back in town it is always the East End, and there is little reference to Venice: Bassanio is even referred to as an Englishman.

Gobbo, the clownish servant who determines to leave Shylock's employ, is here Mary (Evie Hargreaves, doubling as Nerissa) rather than Lancelot, and there is no sign of the father met and hoodwinked in the street (no bad thing, as the scene needs to be exceptionally well managed in order not to be tedious). But the sense of Shylock's house being only a precarious safe place is enhanced by the encroaching Blackshirts: a drunken Gratiano (Xavier Starr) sporting the scarlet armband relieves himself against Shylock's door while shouting insults. No wonder Shylock urges her daughter to keep away from the windows, little realising that Jessica has decided to elope with Lorenzo.

In this setting, with misogyny added to the anti-semitism, and the jeering males increasingly colluding with the Blackshirts and adopting their uniform - even Antonio and Bassanio are wearing armbands by the time of the court scene - Shylock is all the more threatened and her "merry bond" a forlorn hope for some redress, ultimately forestalled by the legal nicety revealed by the young lawyer (Portia disguised) in court. The whole atmosphere of the play shows up the "Venetians" as an unpleasant and self-righteous lot, with the casual insouciance of their prejudices most in evidence in their treatment of Jessica. She is completely disdained by Lorenzo's male friends, and when she addresses Portia the latter rudely cuts her off (an interpolated exchange, I think): Portia is clearly an upper class anti-semite (and she has also evidenced an unpleasant disdain for the Prince of Morocco here re-imagined as a Maharajah).

In the trial scene Shylock's determination to execute the bond, followed by her utter humiliation, is loaded heavily with prejudice - the jeering of Gratiano at her discomfiture is particularly grating in this production - and she brokenly disappears from the scene by walking down in front of the first row of the audience while the two young lawyers persuade Bassanio and Gratiano to part with the rings which they swore would never leave their fingers.

Back in Belmont Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen) and Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole) spar with their talk of past lovers. This scene can be played as a romantic and lyrical teasing between two youngsters in love, but nowadays it is often, as here, played to show a mounting unhappiness and strain between the two speakers. When the triumphant crowd returns from the city Jessica can hardly feel comfortable surrounded by black-shirted men. But the usual conclusion of the play - a perhaps wary reconciliation of the other two married couples after the debacles with the rings - is interrupted by the off-stage raucous crowd and a sudden collapse of all the characters into a group of doughty East Enders fighting off the fascists in the Battle of Cable Street, as described by Shylock herself.

This transposition on the whole works well, though some of the sound effects and silent projections of headlines and crowd scenes are a bit heavy-handed; the final account of community resistance is doubtless uplifting but has virtually nothing to do with the play. Of course some aspects of the play are sacrificed in order to re-shape it to the political scene of the 1930s. The emotional centre of the play rests on Shylock, a startlingly powerful performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman; we cannot engage very much with the fortune-hunting Bassanio (Gavin Fowler) or the frustrated if entitled Portia (Georgie Fellows), or even with Antonio (Joseph Millson) perhaps impossibly in love with Bassanio himself. The supporting cast are strong, but their characters are on the whole unappealing, a factor which is certainly present in the original play, but which is understandably highlighted here.