The portrait of the late Captain Alving may stare down from the wall in Stephen Unwin's swansong production for the Rose, but the ghosts in Ibsen's gripping 1882 drama are lies, not the dead. They come back to haunt with a greater vengeance than any revenant.
Taking its visual inspiration from Ibsen's description of his drama as "a family story as sad and grey as this rainy day", and from Edvard Munch's 1906 designs for the play, Simon Higlett's set suggests the endless murky rain outside is invading the Alving home. In this grey room, Unwin moves the characters around cleverly, using space to highlight the emotional distance between them. Patrick Drury's excellent, self-deceiving and priggish Pastor Manders is constantly retreating physically from Mrs Alving. The spectre that hangs between them is of the man he might have been had he only allowed himself to recognise the truth.
Unwin is an adroit director of Ibsen, and there is so much that is good here, including Pip Donaghy's wheedling Engstrand, a man with a crafty eye to the main chance. Best of all is Kelly Hunter's Mrs Alving, a woman who lies to protect the son she loves, only to see the edifice crumble one evening. You can see the ghost of the playful young girl, who married into misery, in this husk of a woman who mistakenly thinks she can lay the past to rest by opening an orphanage named in honour of her late husband.
It all goes grippingly until the misplaced interval, just 25 minutes from the end. Suddenly the spell is broken, and when we return for the final devastating act, the actors have a mountain to climb. Like the Alvings, the production never recovers.
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