Ghosts Reviews – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

"Hattie Morahan is a simmering maelstrom in this great production"

"Productions of this Norwegian play seem to be either sublime or awful: this one is very, very good indeed."

"Hattie Morahan leads a fine cast and brings her flair for tamped-down, volcanic emotion to the part of Helene Alving, trying to control the damage her terrible sea-captain husband wreaked on her and his offspring."

"The action is condensed into 100 atmospheric minutes, though the candle lighting of this venue proves a slightly-too-obvious expression of the play’s metaphors of light and darkness."

"Morahan hasn’t been on stage often enough since she won an Evening Standard Award for playing Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 2012, but she’s devastating here."

"Shows the Globe shouldn’t always stick to Shakespeare"

"Hattie Morahan gives an impassioned turn in Henrik Ibsen's tale of family truth-telling"

"Such a setting of gloaming and candlelight is the ideal location for Joe Hill-Gibbins’s thrillingly stripped-back burst of family truth-telling from Henrik Ibsen."

"Hill-Gibbins is a director whose work I have often struggled to admire, finding it too self-consciously experimental, often to the detriment of the original text. Yet here he is in his element with a 100-minute adaptation that takes no unnecessary liberties, but rather underlines the strength and punch of Ibsen’s themes, which included incest and were all considered scandalous in 1881."

"Now is the time for truth-telling and Morahan, an impassioned and emotional actress, does not hold back."

"Bold staging"

"Stylish, visually inventive production of Ibsen’s notorious 1882 tragedy"

"This streamlined new version, adapted and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, is accessible and absorbing, focusing on themes of coercive control and cycles of abusive behaviour, but balancing the grim content with plenty of pitch-black comedy."

"Paul Hilton provides much of this dark humour with an especially ridiculous take on sanctimonious Father Manders... Hilton nails the character’s hypocrisy, bloviating at length about his importance to the community but unable to offer any comfort or guidance to his flock – only hollow platitudes and blustering outrage."

"Hill-Gibbins’ bold staging uses the Wanamaker’s unique candlelit space to great effect, with fast-paced scenes and striking images lending the production an appealing cinematic quality."

"Hattie Morahan and Paul Hilton are superb in this intimate, empathetic version of the harrowing Ibsen classic"

"This gaspingly intimate revival of Ibsen’s scandalous 1881 play marks the first UK production since 2018 for Brit auteur director Joe Hill-Gibbins."

"Hill-Gibbins is renowned as a provocateur, but you’re never going to make ‘Ghosts’ as provocative it was the first time around"

"What feels boldest is the relationship between Helene and local priest Father Manders (the ever-excellent Paul Hilton)"

"The patron saint of tragic women in plays by leftfield British directors, Morahan could do this role in her sleep – but it’s her willingness to rein Helene in that defines her performance. There are no fireworks here: it’s important to the production that Helene comes across as grounded and sympathetic, regardless of her terrible circumstances."

"A lot of directors like to put you through the wringer with ‘Ghosts’. In a way Hill-Gibbins goes for the opposite with a production that’s like a warm glass of barbiturates before a slip into oblivion."

"Ibsen makes his debut at the Globe with this slick, sulphurous production"

"This staging of Ibsen's 1881 classic isn't perfect but it marks a rare success for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse with its high calibre cast"

"It’s a good fit for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – a theatre built for secrets and shadows and which has just the right claustrophobic intimacy for a play in which the dead persistently press down on the living. And its great too to see actors of the calibre of Hattie Morahan, Greg Hicks and Paul Hilton, not to mention director and adapter Joe Hill-Gibbins, at Shakespeare’s Globe – a place not usually brilliant at attracting high level talent."

"Yet Hill-Gibbins deftly refreshes the text without us barely realising; we are not in 19th century Norway but instead in some undefined modern day"

"Yet while Morahan brings a playful intelligence to Mrs Alving, I missed the sucker punch to the gut Lesley Manville achieved in Richard Eyre’s consummate production a decade ago. And Hilton never fully makes sense of Father Manders"

"A fine cast are stranded in Ibsen by candlelight"

"Ibsen’s full, complex, upholstered drama does not lend itself to empty space, and the bizarre decision to have maroon fur underfoot seems to maroon (in the other sense) the actors. The result is that their accomplished performances come across like polished rehearsals"

"Hill-Gibbins’s new version of the text takes on with aplomb its dysfunctional sparring and sustained adversarial pitch, but does not quite release it from a problematic starchiness. Having said that, the casting itself is irreproachable: Hattie Morahan brings hectic urgency to Mrs Alving, and Paul Hilton as Father Mandors is superb"

"Joe Hill-Gibbins directs his own version of the psychodrama, creating a potent atmosphere with designer Rosanna Vize"

"A play that dealt in bold subject matter for its time (from venereal disease and incest to euthanasia and critiques of the nuclear family), it sounds crisply modern in Joe Hill-Gibbins’ adaptation. Also directing, he divests the drama of its naturalistic qualities."

"An already claustrophobic play becomes almost smothering in this reduced space, and much more clearly a psychodrama. But the production is rather thudding, even awkwardly comical at times"

"The humour stops us from plumbing the play’s emotional depths and the scenes of contained passion do not have enough potency. Still, the cast is strong and Morahan is magnificent in her maternal desperation. Ultimately, it is a production full of clever concepts: I walked away in admiration rather than devastated by its closing moments."

"The audience are trapped with the characters in the unravelling nightmare of a toxic secret."

"In Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production, the story plays out as a brooding psychodrama, steeped in candlelight, with the characters clasped in an unfurnished, carpeted room."

"Hattie Morahan as Helene and Stuart Thompson as Osvald bring a mesmerising intensity to this mother-son dance of death, and there’s welcome black comedy from Paul Hilton as the self-serving priest. It’s all a little muted, though, and the pacing feels strangely slow in places"

"I should have wept, but it’s just too gloomy"

"It’s also a masterpiece. Yet staged in the non-metaphorical gloom of the candlelit confines of the indoor playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe, I found it too unremittingly dismal to succumb to."

"As the candlelight reflects off the mirrored backdrop, the agonies pile on each other. The sympathetic Stuart Thompson, in shorts and cardigan, is a contemporary reading of Osvald in a show otherwise less fixed in its modernity. Meanwhile, Morahan, who had a deserved hit starring in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House a decade ago, is miraculously good as a strong, strained woman who has done wonders with the bum hand she was dealt."

"There are flashes of wit, but there is no hope here to offset all the gloom. So there is no tension. This well-crafted but overgloomy evening left me feeling I was trapped in a radio play I couldn’t turn off."

"Secrets, lies...and silliness"

"... director and adaptor Joe Hill-Gibbins has marshalled all the nuance off the page, and squished the tragedy into something more like a sitcom. It’s less a mother’s nightmare, more Dad’s Army."

"It’s a shame, because Hattie Morahan and Stuart Thompson (as mother and son) have a neatly bleak final scene, but by then the game is already lost."