Skip to main content

Review of Ghosts at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

I was very much looking forward to seeing the new Made In Northampton version of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, as I had heard on the grapevine nice things about the early previews. Maybe my hopes had been raised too much?

Widow Helen Alving is about to dedicate an orphanage she has built in the memory of her late husband, Captain Alving. However, with her son Oswald home after her having banished him away from the family home for his own good, and Pastor Manders visiting on a rare occasion, hidden stories of the past, ghosts, come to bear changing life in the Alving house forever.

Ibsen was very much a forward and often controversial thinker with his plays, and here is no different, this is challenging and controversial material for the time, and indeed even now the morals held within have great bearing. It's clearly a brilliant play, however, there are too many issues with this production to make it a perfect version.

The opening scene is a tough one to get into, a confrontation between Regina Engstrand (Eleanor McLoughlin) and her father Jakob Engstrand (Declan Conlon) is awkward and slow and doesn't help the story get going. You want Jakob to be more intimidating that he is, he is so out of place in this environment, that he should truly feel it, and this rarely comes across. Also, McLoughlin as Regina really feels poorly created, in the opening scene, too boring to help the play get started, then her later final scene, overly stylised character, it grates and feels wrong. It is though maybe the only criticism to throw at the performers here, and it might be a criticism for the director more than the actor.

Elsewhere there are superb performances, which despite the first act being played at a stilted fixed pace, brings great moments of drama. The confrontation between Penny Downie as Helen and James Wilby as Pastor Manders is remarkable, and here you can see why both Ibsen's text was so controversial at the time, and now it is even more so, as it all elicited gasps from the audience. It's true that Downie provides one of the better performances on the Royal stage for a while, portraying often just visually the inner turmoil as secrets spill out. Wilby equally impresses, although I think he has more to offer and was at times a little hesitant with his delivery, including one quite obvious fluff. This performance though I suspect will bed in more in future shows.

The breakdown of the family is tremendous, and Pierro Niel-Mee is brilliant as Osvald Alving. A spiralling mess of a person as he confronts both his own health and through Downie the effect of the sins of the father. Their final scene together is gut-wrenching.

So, while, the acting is all generally excellent, the two acts feel disjointed, the first at a fixed pace, which thankfully is the shorter of the two, so, passes relatively swiftly, however, the second, while better paced in rhythm, with some nice pauses, feels much slower in comparison and fails to deliver often the tension it should until the final scenes.

The audience also was a curious bunch, as ever for guest night, laughing at moments that totally felt wrong, but it was so hard to tell whether the production was looking to add this humour into places it wasn't needed, to try to make some point. I felt much of the second half in this audience uncomfortable as a result.

What grates most though with this production is all the need for symbolism within Mike Britton's design. The set is cramped beyond belief on the Royal stage, sure, probably to offer how claustrophobic life is becoming. However, all it ends up doing is making the whole play a nightmare for the performers as they have to navigate tiny spaces. The garish colouring of the walls offers nothing other than I guess, more symbolism of the home in the depths of the fjords. Then we have the coup de theatre moment, which I guess offers more symbolism of the break up of the family, but just feels like a trick they want to pull off because they could. All it results in leaving is a rather awkward step up and down for the actors to deal with, leaving the rest of the play a little odd to watch, as feet disappear and reappear as they move around. It's a shame, as I have absolutely loved Britton's sets in the past, but, for me, I feel too many ideas have been used to the detriment of the production.


I wanted to like Ghosts more than I did, and performance wise, it is mostly a cracking piece, with Downie, Wilby and Niel-Mee in blistering form. However, many of the production ideas often get in the way of getting a true feeling that this is the actor's piece, as it should be. It is still a great piece of theatre though, I just feel that this was so close to being a superb one.

Too many ideas often get in the way of the superb cast showing what they are capable of doing.
⭐⭐⭐½

Performance reviewed: Wednesday 24th April 2019 at the Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton.
Ghosts runs at Royal & Derngate until Saturday 11th May 2019. 

For further details about the Royal & Derngate see their website at http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk

Photos: Sheila Burnett
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Review of The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel is perhaps the perfect antidote to the troubled times we are in, harking back to when things were perhaps simpler and mass media and the press were less in your face. Not to say that bigshot Charlie Chaplin didn't make a name for himself in more than just the movies he made. This though is a warm show, filled with love. This show is based on the very real tale of the 1910 ship heading course for New York, which aboard were Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, unknown, but part of Fred Karno’s music hall troupe, and destined for different, but very major futures. Told by an Idiot's production with Theatre Royal Plymouth (and Royal & Derngate and Unity Theatre) breaks down the tale of the voyage of the SS Cairnrona with intriguingly created flashbacks of the life, generally of Charlie Chaplin. Therefore along the course of the voyage, we see Laurel's moment as understudy to Chaplin, the birth of Chaplin (brilliantly...
Read more

Review of The Pillowman at The Playhouse Theatre, Northampton

The Pillowman sounds such a friendly title, and to be fair, his story is one of the lighter aspects of Martin McDonagh's script. It still involves dead children though, if you want to get a clear vision of how dark this play is. Set in a police state of the future, Katurian (Toby Pugh) is taken in for the content of his often violent stories and a similarity to a spate of recent child killings. Here in detention cell 13, his police captors, Tupolski (Adrian Wyman) and Ariel (Steve While) play good cop, bad cop while holding over the threat of violence against Katurian's mentally disabled brother Michal (Patrick Morgan), being held in another cell. The Pillowman is clearly a very warped story, with the blackest of black comedy, and often also very offensive with it's racial stereotyping and disability. In fact, it is no surprise that a couple left in the interval, as I would happily admit that this play is far from everyone. I like a good black comedy though, and ...
Read more

Review of Northern Ballet - The Great Gatsby at Milton Keynes Theatre

This production of The Great Gatsby performed by Northern Ballet was my fifth encounter at the theatre of a full ballet production and as before, I happily share my review of the show with nearly zero knowledge of-the-art form and more of a casual theatre-goer. You could say that this is a poor direction to come in on a review, but I would say that casual audience are the ones to review this for. Over the years, Northern Ballet has set quite a high benchmark for ballet productions, and any audience member who is worth their salt as a ballet fan would no doubt have tickets for this new touring version of the 2013 version of The Great Gatsby , lovingly created by David Nixon OBE. So much is Nixon part of the very fabric of this show, that he not only provides the choreography and direction but also the initial scenario and costume design (assisted by Julie Anderson). So, discounting those ballet fans already sitting in the audience, what does this offer for the more casual theatre-goer ...
Read more