When Ibsen’s Ghosts was first produced in London in 1891, it was dismissed by one critic as “an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly”. The festering atmosphere of Polly Findlay’s revival, using an updated version by David Watson, suggests the early reviewer got it just about right; though now we might use the same terms in glowing approbation.
You wonder, for instance, what could be a more insidious example of a dirty deed done in public than Mrs Alving’s plan to expunge the sins of her dissolute husband by funding an orphanage. More than once you’re forced to consider what kind of children’s home could possibly be established in the late Captain Alving’s honour. The foul-mouthed carpenter Engstand threatens his daughter Regine with the prospect of: “That kiddies’ home … She’ll [Mrs Alving] bung you in there with those pikey little … before you can say bon-fucking-jour.”
The problem with presenting Ghosts in this fashion is that the groundbreaking content (extra-marital sex, addiction, euthanasia) can begin to appear like the commonplaces of soap opera. William Travis’s leery Engstrand and Norah Lopez Holden’s chippy Regine hurl insults at one another in a raw Mancunian rasp that sometimes makes it feel as though the action is located in the only fjord in range of Weatherfield. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance about this community being so obsequiously beholden to a local pastor; not to mention Oswald being able to procure tablets to hasten his demise, though apparently not a course of penicillin to treat his symptoms in the first place.
Findlay, however, circumvents these issues by framing the action with a form of naturalism so intense it becomes almost unnatural. The everyday slovenliness of Johannes Schütz’s set suggests the chaos of a distempered mind, though Franz Peter David’s lighting casts a lurid glow on an upstage set of crystalware. There’s a remarkable frisson as Ken Nwosu’s languorous Oswald idly runs a finger around the rim of his wine glass, creating an eerie reverberation that seems to summon the phantoms of past sins to the table.
Nwosu is quietly heartbreaking in the role of the doomed artist, though it is hard to be sure if his soothing description of his diagnosis – “cherry red velvet, it made me think of, draped all over me” – is a palliative lie or a conditioned response instilled by Lutheran sermons on easeful death. One certainly would not wish to entrust the stewardship of one’s soul to Jamie Ballard’s pallid Pastor Manders, whose rejection of Niamh Cusack’s Helen Alving in her hour of need seems particularly spineless.
Cusack gives an exceptional performance as a woman rapidly unravelling under the burden of her life. Ibsen’s play is indeed an open drain; though it takes an actor of Cusack’s calibre to plumb the depths.
• At Home, Manchester, until 3 December. Box office: 0161-200 1500.