Everyman Palace Cork
AS HENRIK Ibsen continued to drive a harrow through the conventions of his time in 1881, he chose, in Ghosts, the notion of a mother's love as his implement.
Typically, he did not sanction sanctity despite the calm sitting-room in which Mrs Alving is finalising a memorial to her husband while also welcoming home her son Oswald. In an ironic acknowledgement of the dissolute life of her late spouse, the memorial is an orphanage; the son is indeed a prodigal, for whom Mrs Alving prepares not only to kill the fatted calf but even, possibly, to kill the diseased young man himself.
She is the rock against which the still-turbulent eddies of her husband’s depravity break into waves of intimate intensity, and as directed by Michael Cabot, this London Classic Theatre production allows Pauline Whitaker to convey the cost at which Mrs Alving controlled her household and family. Labouring under a hairstyle resembling a cottage loaf, Whitaker’s stateliness keeps the domestic turmoil in balance, dismissing the machinations of old Engstrand, an evildoer in whom Peter Cadden manages to invest some charm, and diverting Oswald’s interest in the ambitious maid Regine (Abbey Leamon). In a tide of truth-telling, ghostly connections issue from the past like crabs from a crevice, none more surprising than the hint of an early intimacy between Mrs Alving and her ill-chosen adviser, Pastor Manders. Here Brendan Fleming needs to loosen up a little if the influence of this role is to be justified: when his stateliness meets that of his patroness they both seem pinioned by their need to explain, excuse and condemn.
But they all work hard: as the orphanage goes up in predictable flames and Hasan Dixon’s convincing Oswald breaks down in dementia, Ibsen’s allegory as revived by Frank McGuinness loses none of its power to startle or even, still at this distance, to shock.
