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In ‘Ludic Proxy,’ a Blur of Actual and Virtual Reality
By ALEXIS SOLOSKIIn Richard Eyre’s Production of ‘Ghosts,’ the Clean Parts Are the Most Disturbing
NYT Critics’ PickBy BEN BRANTLEY
So this is what all the fuss was about. Richard Eyre’s full-strength production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” which opened over the weekend at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, allows you to feel the bruising force with which this drama assaulted unsuspecting audiences of the late 19th century.
“Ghosts,” after all, remains the great historical example of a single play’s power to disturb. Its first productions left theatergoers reeling and revolted, with critics scrambling to outdo one another with expressions of disgust and derision, including The Daily Telegraph’s immortal characterization of the play as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.”
Cultural shock tremors tend to subside over the years, allowing later generations to chuckle at how squeamish and priggish their ancestors were. Then along comes a production like this “Ghosts,” adapted and directed by Mr. Eyre and starring a coruscating Lesley Manville, and the laughter dies in our throats.
Lesley Manville as the widowed Helene Alving in Richard Eyre’s production of “Ghosts,” set in a Norwegian country house, with design by Tim Hatley and lighting by Peter Mumford. Credit
For what comes through so searingly in this version, from the Almeida Theater in London — possibly the best “Ghosts” you’ll ever see — is the Jehovah-like mercilessness of Ibsen’s indictment of a middle class that remains smug in an advanced state of decay. You realize, with a visceral jolt, that what unsettled this work’s early audiences weren’t just the play’s explicit references to unsavory matters like venereal disease.
What really must have gotten them — and what still gets us — is the drama’s unstinting attack on the rottenness of their comfortable everyday world and their own individual complicity in sustaining it. Society, with a capital S, is no autonomous monster here, devouring hapless victims. Everybody in “Ghosts” is guilty, and Mr. Eyre’s production measures the crippling pain of that guilt and the extreme penalties that come with it.
The story is as airtight and inexorable as that of a Greek tragedy. These qualities are emphasized by the compactness of Mr. Eyre’s adaptation (which runs an intermission-free 90 minutes), the tense physicality of the cast, the ominous rush of John Leonard’s sound design, and the searching, smothering sun and shadow of Peter Mumford’s lighting.
Then there is Tim Hatley’s claustrophobically elegant set. It shows a handsome room in a Norwegian country house, all gleaming surfaces and clean-lined furniture, illuminated by chandeliers. Yet from the beginning it’s hard not to feel that this room is a prison, a cousin to the cozy corner of hell Sartre would later conjure for “No Exit.”
Yes, the walls are translucent, allowing glimpses of a dining room that opens onto a garden. But every time a door closes — and doors are always being closed, and finally locked, in this production — there’s a sense of terminal confinement. Nobody gets out of this place alive, or not fully alive, least of all the lady of the manor, the widowed Helene Alving (Ms. Manville). This may be her gracious home, but it is also her coffin.
Mrs. Alving is only vaguely aware that this is her destiny when the play begins. After a life of deceit and denial, she is beginning to hope again, and Ms. Manville is heartbreakingly aglow with the promise of second chances.
Her grown son, Oswald (the open-faced Billy Howle), an artist who has been living abroad, has returned after a long absence. And she is looking forward to laying to rest at last the spirit of her husband, a prominent businessman who died 10 years earlier, with the opening of an orphanage in his name.
Spirits are never laid to rest in “Ghosts,” though, an idea that’s visually underscored by the reflective walls of Mr. Hatley’s set, which subtly echo the images of its inhabitants. When you see Oswald, with his father’s pipe in his mouth, through these walls, you understand the shiver of recognition he inspires in those who knew his father. Daddy’s home. He never left.
The play chronicles Mrs. Alving’s growing consciousness of the enduring presence and legacy of the lecherous, alcoholic husband she never loved and of the consequences of pretending that her marriage was a good one. Ms. Manville, best known in the United States for her work in Mike Leigh movies (“All or Nothing,” “Another Year”), charts her character’s varying repression and awareness with a scalpel-edged exactitude.
Her Mrs. Alving, for which she won an Olivier Award in London, is no lugubrious relic. A playful and daring intelligence illuminates Ms. Manville’s features in the early scenes. And a fond, yearning sensuality ripples through her scenes with Pastor Manders (a first-rate Will Keen), the fastidious cleric whom she loved as a young woman.
The pastor is a tenacious embodiment of the hypocritical morality Mrs. Alving believes she has put behind her. In the decade since her husband died, she has read deeply in the latest moral philosophy and feminist literature. She is eager to defend these newly acquired viewpoints to her still-beloved Manders, and to ally herself with her bohemian son as a free woman.
But the God who created this universe — i.e., Henrik Ibsen — isn’t about to let her off that easy. Only the members of the lower classes — like the Alvings’ maid, Regina, and her dirty old dad, Jacob (Charlene McKenna and Brian McCardie, both excellent) — are allowed any degree of freedom. And that’s because they both accept and manipulate the double-dealing society that rules them.
Harsh revelations, thundering with a cosmic irony that no lesser playwright could get away with, seal Mrs. Alving into a captivity that will be a life sentence. These developments are borne on a suspenseful momentum that recalls the British director Carrie Cracknell’s Hitchcockian staging of another Ibsen play about a woman under siege, “A Doll’s House,” seen at the Academy last year, starring Hattie Morahan as Nora Helmer.
That production now feels like an ideal, awakening prelude to “Ghosts,” a play of which Ibsen wrote, “I couldn’t stop at ‘A Doll’s House’; after Nora, I had to create Mrs. Alving.” Ms. Manville’s performance makes us feel the urgent truth of those words, and the connection between the two heroines.
This Mrs. Alving is, clearly and pathetically, what Nora might have become had she remained in her doll’s house. As Ms. Manville presents her, there’s still enough of the radiant young woman who was smarter than she realized, with the instinctive knowledge that she had to bolt or die, to make us mourn her loss most grievously.
Ghosts
By Henrik Ibsen; adapted and directed by Richard Eyre; design by Tim Hatley; lighting by Peter Mumford; sound by John Leonard; associate director, Elena Araoz; literal translation by Charlotte Barslund; production manager, Simon Sturgess; wig and hair design by Angela Cobbin; company stage manager, Jenefer Tait; American stage manager, R. Michael Blanco; general manger, Fiona Stewart. A production of the Almeida Theater. Rupert Goold, artistic director; and Sonia Friedman Productions, Ms. Friedman, producer, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Alan H. Fishman, chairman; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene; 718-636-4100, bam.org. Through May 3. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Lesley Manville (Helene Alving), Billy Howle (Oswald Alving), Will Keen (Pastor Manders), Brian McCardie (Jacob Engstrand) and Charlene McKenna (Regina Engstrand).
By ALEXIS SOLOSKIIn Richard Eyre’s Production of ‘Ghosts,’ the Clean Parts Are the Most Disturbing
NYT Critics’ PickBy BEN BRANTLEY
So this is what all the fuss was about. Richard Eyre’s full-strength production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” which opened over the weekend at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, allows you to feel the bruising force with which this drama assaulted unsuspecting audiences of the late 19th century.
“Ghosts,” after all, remains the great historical example of a single play’s power to disturb. Its first productions left theatergoers reeling and revolted, with critics scrambling to outdo one another with expressions of disgust and derision, including The Daily Telegraph’s immortal characterization of the play as “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly.”
Cultural shock tremors tend to subside over the years, allowing later generations to chuckle at how squeamish and priggish their ancestors were. Then along comes a production like this “Ghosts,” adapted and directed by Mr. Eyre and starring a coruscating Lesley Manville, and the laughter dies in our throats.
What really must have gotten them — and what still gets us — is the drama’s unstinting attack on the rottenness of their comfortable everyday world and their own individual complicity in sustaining it. Society, with a capital S, is no autonomous monster here, devouring hapless victims. Everybody in “Ghosts” is guilty, and Mr. Eyre’s production measures the crippling pain of that guilt and the extreme penalties that come with it.
The story is as airtight and inexorable as that of a Greek tragedy. These qualities are emphasized by the compactness of Mr. Eyre’s adaptation (which runs an intermission-free 90 minutes), the tense physicality of the cast, the ominous rush of John Leonard’s sound design, and the searching, smothering sun and shadow of Peter Mumford’s lighting.
Then there is Tim Hatley’s claustrophobically elegant set. It shows a handsome room in a Norwegian country house, all gleaming surfaces and clean-lined furniture, illuminated by chandeliers. Yet from the beginning it’s hard not to feel that this room is a prison, a cousin to the cozy corner of hell Sartre would later conjure for “No Exit.”
Yes, the walls are translucent, allowing glimpses of a dining room that opens onto a garden. But every time a door closes — and doors are always being closed, and finally locked, in this production — there’s a sense of terminal confinement. Nobody gets out of this place alive, or not fully alive, least of all the lady of the manor, the widowed Helene Alving (Ms. Manville). This may be her gracious home, but it is also her coffin.
Mrs. Alving is only vaguely aware that this is her destiny when the play begins. After a life of deceit and denial, she is beginning to hope again, and Ms. Manville is heartbreakingly aglow with the promise of second chances.
Her grown son, Oswald (the open-faced Billy Howle), an artist who has been living abroad, has returned after a long absence. And she is looking forward to laying to rest at last the spirit of her husband, a prominent businessman who died 10 years earlier, with the opening of an orphanage in his name.
Spirits are never laid to rest in “Ghosts,” though, an idea that’s visually underscored by the reflective walls of Mr. Hatley’s set, which subtly echo the images of its inhabitants. When you see Oswald, with his father’s pipe in his mouth, through these walls, you understand the shiver of recognition he inspires in those who knew his father. Daddy’s home. He never left.
The play chronicles Mrs. Alving’s growing consciousness of the enduring presence and legacy of the lecherous, alcoholic husband she never loved and of the consequences of pretending that her marriage was a good one. Ms. Manville, best known in the United States for her work in Mike Leigh movies (“All or Nothing,” “Another Year”), charts her character’s varying repression and awareness with a scalpel-edged exactitude.
Her Mrs. Alving, for which she won an Olivier Award in London, is no lugubrious relic. A playful and daring intelligence illuminates Ms. Manville’s features in the early scenes. And a fond, yearning sensuality ripples through her scenes with Pastor Manders (a first-rate Will Keen), the fastidious cleric whom she loved as a young woman.
The pastor is a tenacious embodiment of the hypocritical morality Mrs. Alving believes she has put behind her. In the decade since her husband died, she has read deeply in the latest moral philosophy and feminist literature. She is eager to defend these newly acquired viewpoints to her still-beloved Manders, and to ally herself with her bohemian son as a free woman.
But the God who created this universe — i.e., Henrik Ibsen — isn’t about to let her off that easy. Only the members of the lower classes — like the Alvings’ maid, Regina, and her dirty old dad, Jacob (Charlene McKenna and Brian McCardie, both excellent) — are allowed any degree of freedom. And that’s because they both accept and manipulate the double-dealing society that rules them.
Harsh revelations, thundering with a cosmic irony that no lesser playwright could get away with, seal Mrs. Alving into a captivity that will be a life sentence. These developments are borne on a suspenseful momentum that recalls the British director Carrie Cracknell’s Hitchcockian staging of another Ibsen play about a woman under siege, “A Doll’s House,” seen at the Academy last year, starring Hattie Morahan as Nora Helmer.
That production now feels like an ideal, awakening prelude to “Ghosts,” a play of which Ibsen wrote, “I couldn’t stop at ‘A Doll’s House’; after Nora, I had to create Mrs. Alving.” Ms. Manville’s performance makes us feel the urgent truth of those words, and the connection between the two heroines.
This Mrs. Alving is, clearly and pathetically, what Nora might have become had she remained in her doll’s house. As Ms. Manville presents her, there’s still enough of the radiant young woman who was smarter than she realized, with the instinctive knowledge that she had to bolt or die, to make us mourn her loss most grievously.
Ghosts
By Henrik Ibsen; adapted and directed by Richard Eyre; design by Tim Hatley; lighting by Peter Mumford; sound by John Leonard; associate director, Elena Araoz; literal translation by Charlotte Barslund; production manager, Simon Sturgess; wig and hair design by Angela Cobbin; company stage manager, Jenefer Tait; American stage manager, R. Michael Blanco; general manger, Fiona Stewart. A production of the Almeida Theater. Rupert Goold, artistic director; and Sonia Friedman Productions, Ms. Friedman, producer, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Alan H. Fishman, chairman; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene; 718-636-4100, bam.org. Through May 3. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Lesley Manville (Helene Alving), Billy Howle (Oswald Alving), Will Keen (Pastor Manders), Brian McCardie (Jacob Engstrand) and Charlene McKenna (Regina Engstrand).