Ghosts, Lyric Hammersmith Theatre - turns out, they do fuck you up

A single sofa is all we have on stage to attract our eye - the signifier of intimate family evenings, chummy breakfast TV and, more recently, Graham Norton’s bonhomie. Until you catch proper sight of the room’s walls that is, which are not, as you first thought, Duluxed in a bland magnolia shade, nor even panelled with upmarket modernist abstract paintings, befitting of the whiff of wealth that suffuses the space.

It’s a man’s head, repeating and repeating and repeating, turned away, bull-necked, present but not present, intimidating from beyond the grave. I was in the stalls and I felt it! 

This “bold reimagining” (reimaginings are always bold) marks a fifth partnership between writer, Gary Owen, and director (Lyric Hammersmith’s Artistic Director) Rachel O’Riordan. That history matters, because the production is closer to being "After Ibsen", inspired by his Ghosts rather than a version thereof, so much detail changed to transport the play from the 1880s Norwegian coastal retreat to a 2020s English country house. But the two collaborators helm that journey with a sure hand and reap the reward of a play fiercely staking out its place in the here and now.Helena is endowing a hospital for sick children (a subject she knows plenty about) with her large inheritance after her husband, Captain Carl Alving’s, slow death from cancer – it's his head on the walls of course. She’s doing it in part because he would hate it – which tells you all you need to know about their marriage. Well not quite all as it turns out, because this play is riddled with secrets, swirling about like the mists behind the picture window. She’s there with her son, Oz, an actor who breezes out of his room at midday to collect a bottle of wine, with a wisecrack or two as a greeting. 

In this rather chilly if not atypical household, with kids these days staying at home far longer than they did even a generation ago, Reggie, an educated, confident young woman works as a skivvy more than a housekeeper, patronised but liked in that upper middle class way from Chekhov. Her father, Jacob, a plasterer/fixer, is also on the payroll, working for the charity that has almost completed building the hospital, but he dreams of setting himself up as a property mini-mogul, finding late in life that he has been too pliant in his dealings with the lord of the manor.

These people have long histories between them, time having done its work to foster resentments alongside ties; grudges are long held, the damage done and pushed to one side; and resolutions have been sidestepped, the uncomfortable status quo festering as a better option than the alternatives. It is a system physicists call an unstable equilibrium, like a broom precariously balanced on the palm of your hand, a touch either way enough to send it crashing to the floor.

That touch arrives with the lawyer and trustee of the hospital charity, Andersen, an old flame of Helena from her vivacious student days, which are not hard to imagine. She flirts outrageously with him (one gets the idea that it’s a default for her even in middle age and one wonders, but not for long, why it should be so) and he fends her off, uneasily and with a half-heartedness she notices. Then he tells her that the Board want to take the Captain’s name off the hospital as a result of #MeToo rumours too persistent to brush off. That broom I mentioned wobbles, the blue touch paper is lit and, boy-oh-boy, do those fireworks light up.

In a tremendous ensemble cast (Anna Cooper has done a wonderful job finding such a team) Victoria Smurfit holds the centre, as does Helena in her house. Sometimes coquettish, often vulnerable, sometimes thin-skinned, often hard-nosed, she captures the contradictions of a woman born with looks, money and brains, but who cannot find a route out of the physical and psychological prison into which she stumbled, her husband the ruthless jailer, even posthumously. It is due to the sensitivity of the performance and quality of the writing that we have to remind ourselves of the oceanic privilege she enjoys. But it’s not enough – such advantages have their limits – as the past, and those ghosts, catch up with her accommodations with the truth, reality biting very hard indeed.

Callum Scott Howell (pictured above with Patricia Allison) is terribly funny as Oz, the man stuck in perpetual adolescence with his bleach-blond hair and Boris Johnson accent. Establishing that likability early on, albeit seasoned with spoilt brat irritations, a shield for his crippling anxiety, proves the key to landing his pivot in the second act. As the truths crowd into hius head, his loneliness takes him into transgressive territory that produced gasps in the house, I suspect from Gen Z-ers whom we know can be shocked more easily than any generation since the 1950s. It may be, as I heard it described, "Just another Tuesday in Ancient Greece"  for those acquainted with the Classics, but a killer line does remind you that incest really is a step too far.

As Reggie, Patricia Allison has less time to fill out her character’s naivety, so her attempted extortion of Helena had an unfortunate echo of Dr Evil’s underpitched offer in one of those Austin Powers movies that became so unfashionable so quickly. But she does capture how strong the isolation of contemporary life can be for a young person, especially growing up away from the bright lights of the city in an overly-paternalistic environment driven by guilt.

Rhashan Stone and Deka Walmsley, as the lawyer with a malleable conscience and the only one of the whole lot who actually does anything substantive in his work, fill more minor roles, primarily on stage to prompt backstories and drive the plot forward. Nevertheless, these are two believable men (you could easily see them in The Cherry Orchard written two decades after Ghosts, Chekhov and Ibsen kindred spirits) and they bring out a necessary class conflict alongside the more personal traumas that threaten to overwhelm the play.

Overwhelming might be the mot juste for a production that burns slowly at first but builds into an emotional conflagration that leaves you in mind of Philip Larkin’s infamous verdict on your mum and dad. I’ve seen this play twice with my son, once aged 16 and now aged 27 and I’m still a bit too scared to ask him exactly how he feels about it. But I think we both know that Larkin was on to something; and so was Ibsen, in 1881 and 2025.     

• Ghosts at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith until 10 May
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk