Dateline Dublin, Ireland — THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NO REASON, of course, why a country’s national theater shouldn’t perform a classic play from a completely different nation. It’s indeed been very heartening to see the Abbey Theatre in Dublin mounting a new version, somewhat reworked in-house, of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen’s striking modern tragedy, Ghosts.
The piece has gained its ‘modern’ moniker by subverting dramatic conventions dating back to the ancient Greeks, decreeing that tragedy befalls characters who break society’s (or deities’) moral codes. The woes that beset Ghosts’ characters result from moral codes being stubbornly enforced. There’s a message here for many a society today, in Ireland or anywhere else.
Director Mark O’Rowe has rewritten the 1881 script, mainly giving much of the dialogue a rare, fluidly conversational flavor. It sounds distinctly Irish, with a greater demotic flow than that I’ve heard in other productions. Ibsen’s circumlocution, with all its evasions and dourness, has been both abbreviated and sharpened.
It’s dour at times, yes, but wry humor is also cannily extracted from the hypocrisy in evidence among the cast of five, not least of all Declan Conlon’s Pastor Manders (right). Conlon’s triumph in this often stiff, one-sided role is to intertwine with the Pastor’s overbearing rectitude some touching humanity, compassion and even a dash of humble if not quite endearing befuddlement.
THE ENTIRE PLAY takes place in a sun-room or conservatory. But the highly realistic set (by Francis O’Connor) emphasizes pelting rain rather than sunshine; downpours are an apt backdrop to this lachrymose story of a family doomed by stigma and the fear of stigma.
A marriage broken but indissoluble … illegitimate progeny … sexually transmitted disease … these are all issues that today wouldn’t necessarily impose the implacable burdens they did in the late nineteenth century. But there remains much that is timeless in the deep and initially denied suffering of Cathy Belton as Helena, widow to a long-dead, privately vile but publicly venerated pillar of the community, and in that of her distant (and, we learn, deeply unwell) son, Oswald, played by Calam Lynch. Both performances carry powerful conviction.
Ghosts’ infamously difficult final scene, between just the two of them, advances with a tolling, insistently maintained intensity, challenging us not to look away. By the time the curtain falls, mother and son now share a terrible, to us possibly unbearable closeness.
‘Ghosts’ continues at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until May 13th, 2023
