Published: 4 March 2010
by HOWARD LOXTON

HENRIK Ibsen’s dark story is presented here in a new translation by Frank McGuinness that is very easy on the ear. 

It tells of the immorality and disease behind a facade of respectable matrimony, and this version is more explicit than previous ones even though the words “congenital syphilis” are never spoken. 

Banned in Britain  until 1915 (and even after that it was branded “revolting”, “disgusting” and “loathsome”), it still packs a punch. 

Mrs Alving is under the influence of religious bigot, Pastor Manders, to whom she had been attracted before her marriage. 

He is handling her business affairs and those of the orphanage she is founding in her late husband’s memory – a final gesture to preserve the fake image of his uprightness. 

Now she reveals the shocking truth to Manders. 

Oswald, the son she sent away as a child to avoid him discovering the truth, has inherited his father’s disease. 

Lesley Sharp plays her as a strong-minded woman who has lived a lie to maintain public respectability, trapped in a society to which she is forced to conform but now, privately at least, taking a stand for 

her own more liberal ideals. 

In her joy at her son’s return, her hands reach out to touch him. 

She is allowing herself at last to become a physical, emotional woman. 

Iain Glen, who also directs, plays Manders as a sectarian with a Northern Irish accent, giving the role exactly the right connotations for a British audience. 

There is a hint of the lubricious in his reaction to Mrs Alving’s maid (Jessica Raine) but he recoils at the impropriety of Mrs Alving’s touch. 

Floppy-hatted artist Oswald, back from Paris with bohemian ideas of love outside marriage, could not be in greater contrast. 

Harry Treadaway’s performance is all feeling. He brings both passion and sincerity to the final scenes which could so easily have turned into melodrama. 

He cries out for “the sun” – cries that, in this production, become topical pleas for assisted suicide.  

There is another strong performance from Malcolm Storry as the cunning opportunist Engstrand who the maid calls Father. 

Stephen Brimson Lewis’s strikingly pristine set has a segmented façade that serves as an act curtain, making it also like a trap. It is beautifully lit by Oliver Fenwick.

Until May 15 • 0844 209 1805