Ghosts

by Henrik Ibsen adapted by Richard Eyre

seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre on 13 November 2026

Kwame Owusu directs Flora Montgomery as Helene Alving, Joe Pitts as Oswald Alving (her son), Oliver Alvin-Wilson as Pastor Manders, Cecilia Appiah as Regina Engstrand (a maid in the Alving household) and Peter F. Gardiner as Jacob Engstrand (Regina's putative father) in a streamlined version of Ibsen's Ghosts adapted by Richard Eyre.

In a taut 90-minute version of the originally three-act play, the stultifying atmosphere and deadly weight of the past in the Alving household is laid bare with great intensity. Since the Jermyn Street Theatre is so small - it holds an audience of only seventy - the force of the successive revelations of family secrets and abuses is even more compelling; the actors have nowhere to hide when they are almost within touching distance of many in the audience. 

Flora Montgomery gave Mrs Alving the requisite steeliness and patrician disdain in dealing with business matters but soon revealed deep wells of pain endured through determined resilience, unaware perhaps that her efforts to protect her son were also self-serving. Joe Pitts as her "bohemian" son seemed at first merely indulged and petulant, but his apparent callowness gave way to real desperation and fear as he confronted and succumbed to his illness. The final scene between mother and son, both at the end of their tethers, was a masterclass of high drama at close quarters.

The Engstrands, trapped in the coils of the Alving family drama, seemed at one level to be mere chancers, but it is hardly surprising that Regina in particular should recoil from further involvement. I found Oliver Alvin-Wilson's interpretation of Pastor Manders quite fascinating. The pastor has previously struck me as an extremely cold personality, but here his repressive appeals to the moral high ground looked more like desperate attempts to conceal a deep vulnerability of his own. This did not excuse his catastrophic meddling both past and present in the Alving household, but it lent an interesting complexity to his interventions.

After the intriguing modernised version at the Lyric Hammersmith last year (see the review from April 2025) and the rather overblown effort at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2023, it is good to see that a more straightforwardly period rendition of Ibsen's masterpiece is still viable and shocking.