FringeReview UK 2026
Ghosts
Jermyn Street Theatre
Genre: classical, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Tragedy, Translation
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Though using Richard Eyre’s memorably lean 90-minute adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts (which won an Olivier, when premiered at the Almeida by him in 2013), director Kwame Owussu ensures this intimate Jermyn Street Theatre production seethes till it detonates. Just like the Greek tragedies Eyre has sleeked it to. It runs at Jermyn Street till November 14.
The finale here brings the intensity of Greek tragedy – as Richard Eyre intended – and Ibsen, and those unvanquished repressive forces crashing into Jermyn Street. Unforgettable and outstanding.
Review
This mighty reckoning in a little room explodes in the most incandescent conclusion of Ghosts I’ve seen. Though using Richard Eyre’s memorably lean 90-minute adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts (which won an Olivier, when premiered at the Almeida by him in 2013), director Kwame Owussu ensures this intimate Jermyn Street Theatre production seethes till it detonates. Just like the Greek tragedies Eyre has sleeked it to. It runs at Jermyn Street till November 14.
Owussu contrasts that 2013 production – with transparent walls to let the wrong ones in – with Cara Evans’ wood-panelled set. Which claustrophobic effect looks naturalistic and oppressively dark. Little relieves it: the small stack of pamphlets on a side table, the beige chaise-long on which only one person ever reclines.
A father wants his daughter to return with him to a life of squalor. But he knows something to make that even more dangerous. An artist son is returning home from Paris to his mother in Norway: but not for happy reasons, even if an orphanage is being opened in his revered father’s name. When he meets the young woman, a maid in the house, sparks fly. But should they? And what hold does a Pastor have on that mother, or she on him? Sins of the father, mother, elders everywhere are visited on the young. Ghosts are palpable: real in the blood, metaphorical, social and perhaps just spectres, hunting down the living with a mineral cry. Written in 1881, Ibsen’s Ghosts was banned for obscenity, including the UK till 1891: and then permitted only as a one-off private production. Themes of disease, euthanasia, incest and blistering social critique might have had something to do with it.
Flora Montgomery’s Helene Alving exudes an easy command at first, never precluding a radiant warmth. She’s revealing and revealed to. Montgomery’s guilt arises you feel not from inner flaws so much as outer pressures she surrendered to; the ghosts of which pursue her. The pamphlets she now reads show how far she’s developed from when she was imprisoned in others choices: “dead ideas, dead customs, dead morals”. They lend her resolve to live with what she hopes to change; yet her modernity cannot exorcise ancient furies.
Protective towards Regina Engstrand (Cecilia Appiah) yet alarmed, Montgomery’s all noblesse oblige to Regina’s father: Peter F Gardiner’s watchful Jacob Engstrand. Gardiner’s approach suggests where Shaw might have taken hints from Ibsen when crafting his own roguish characters. Gardiner though ensures we see Engstrand’s manipulative brilliance, which reaches its apotheosis with the Pastor.
Engstrand’s attempts to cajole, wheedle and blackmail his daughter to return home and help run a dodgy seaman’s mission fail: because Appiah shows Regina’s learned through him, and perhaps ghosts. Appiah’s gradations of Regina slowly mesmerise: from defiant daughter through barely controlled delight in seeing Oswald, through a furious stand-off with Helene. In her final confrontation with Montgomery and Joe Pitts – his Oswald as ignorant as her till now – Appiah spells out exactly what Regina’s lost with secrets and lies. And here nails it as firmly as Nora does in Ibsen’s preceding play (and first masterpiece) A Doll’s House.
Montgomery’s performance emphasises that Helene remains the morally conflicted centre; assailed by nearly everyone. With Manders there’s history and chemistry. Discovering her husband’s character at 19, Helene fled to the man she’d wanted to marry: theology student (now Pastor) Manders. Who fearing reputation sends her straight back. Manders blandly surmises the husband reformed. Played by Oliver Alvin-Wilson there’s less defensive chill, less shivering repulsion at his own attraction, less hellfire; more the crushing weight of social not spiritual mores. Alvin-Wilson’s – though not Eyre’s – Manders exudes more a secular dead weight, using theology as another big stick. His cracked carapace is not a Manders I’ve seen before, and it took a moment to adjust. Alvin-Wilson hints fright, more palpable when dealing with Engstrand, betraying the way his reputation-obsessed mind works.
It’s clear Helene still harbours passions; Montgomery’s Helene exudes a palpable desire that seems unstoppable; taking floor-space inch by inch to touch Manders. Montgomery’s magnificent. In showing rekindled desire mixed with anxiety, as the light of that passion dies back inside her, and a calibrated explosion at Manders’ intolerable presumptions. Only with Helene’s “You have no idea!” about the truth of her marriage, does Montgomery’s full voice ring out with anguish.
Montgomery’s softer with Pitts’ Oswald Alving, coming in with his cravat pointedly unfastened. For Helene, anxious joy at his return fights with an over-solicitous fuss which Oswald can hardly respect: Helene sent him away at seven. He doesn’t know why, but in Appiah’s vivacious Regina, who’s learned French for a reason, he finds a potential soul-mate. Not just love-interest (all quiet flirts in the alcove) but for a loving act no-one might guess. Pitts is a fresh-seeming Oswald, with a breath of Paris about him, though visibly grows weary. Pitts is briefly vehement with Alvin Wilson, tender, almost indulgent en francais with Appiah: and particularly in the final moments both hurt and awestruck by Montgomery’s Helene.
Nathalie Johnson’s costumes work with the intimate set: raffish workman’s garb for Jacob, smart black unform for Regina, restrained greys for Helene, black again for Manders. Only un-prodigal Oswald seems unbuttoned, slashed with that yellow cravat. Ben Ormerod’s lighting glints dinginess till the last blaze of sun: which brings paradoxically a glowing despair. Francesca Amewudah’s composition and sound design cleverly integrates Heinrich Biber’s famous 1681 Passacaglia for violin (ironically the ‘Guardian Angel’, written exactly 200 years before Ghosts) which notes descend into the tomb. She then riffs on it spectrally in a haunting, distortive requiem for the living.
Only a few decades ago, these scenes might have been played out as AIDs raged through the world (as Elsinore reminds us). But the extraordinary way in which unseen forces both erupt the past and burn down fragile futures (often through blind, ambiguous agents like Manders) seems as contemporary as ever. And it’s in the final 15 minutes, after explosive revelations, recriminations and exits, this production rises beyond any Ghosts of my experience. Here it even excels, if memory serves, Eyre’s 2013 production. That was the finest I’ve seen (and Ghosts usually is produced superbly or not at all). Having seen the terrific Arcola Master Builder only the day before, I’d been expecting that production to be my Ibsen of the week. I can’t emphasise enough how the finale here brings the intensity of Greek tragedy – as Eyre intended – and Ibsen, and those unvanquished repressive forces crashing into Jermyn Street. Unforgettable and outstanding.
Casting Director Matthew Dewsbury CDG, Production Manager Herbe Walmsley, Fight Director Kaitlin Howard, Assistant Director Magnus Thorlacius, Stage Manager Phoebe Buckland. ASM on placement Lucy Brown, Scenic Builder William Aubrey-Jones, Scenic Artist Ellen Rose. Producer Jesse Anand, PR KMPR.
