Flora Montgomery (Helene Alving) and Oliver Alvin-Wilson (Pastor Manders) [David Monteith-Hodge]

RICHARD Eyre’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 Ghosts is a short, sharp shock of a play.

First performed privately in London in 1891, its incendiary themes, including a critique of marriage as obligation, illegitimacy, euthanasia and a hint of incest, led the Lord Chamberlain to refuse it a public licence for years.

As the play opens, Helene Alving (Flora Montgomery, all stiff upper lip) endures the patronising counsel of Manders (a suitably pompous Oliver Alvin-Wilson), a pastor so pious he advises her not to insure the orphanage she founded in memory of her late husband, Captain Alving, because it implies distrust in divine providence. It’s hard to believe she once held a candle for him.

It transpires he has given Helene bad advice before: when she tried to leave her philandering husband, Manders made her return to their sham of a marriage.

Now her son Oswald (a nuanced Joe Pitts) has returned from Paris, where he has been living as an artist, in time for the orphanage’s opening.

He hopes to set up home with the maid Regina (Cecilia Appiah), whose father, Jacob Engstrand (Peter F. Gardiner), is keen for her to help him run a sailors’ hostel.

We learn Oswald has inherited syphilis from his father. He begs his mother to help him die if the illness destroys his mind. Helene reveals other long-buried secrets, releasing ghosts that will haunt them all.

Kwame Owusu’s confident production is a taut 90 minutes as revelations and suppressed desires emerge – the small stage and Cara Evans’s dark-hued panelling deepening the claustrophobia. It’s striking how relevant Ibsen’s exposure of hypocrisy and keeping up appearances still feels.

Until November 14
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk