Ghosts
Duchess, until 15 May
Off the Endz
Royal Court, until 13 March
Ghosts is the most Ibsenite of all Ibsen’s plays. In a sub-Arctic backwater two pairs of lovers pursue doomed romances while outside it drizzles constantly. Oswald can’t marry his mother’s serving-girl because his brain is being attacked by syphilis. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders’s ardour for Mrs Alving is smothered by his inflexible Calvinistic ideals. And outside it’s still drizzling. The external plotting of this great emotional thriller is unusually clumsy. Early on we’re told, in very specific terms, that a brand-new orphanage (made entirely of wood and not covered by buildings insurance) is being overseen by a notoriously clumsy carpenter who drinks too much. Well, I wonder what’s going to happen next. By contrast, the inner plotting is beautifully done, spareness and density closely aligned for heightened contrast. At the heart of the play is the epic Ahab-like figure of Pastor Manders whose moralising haughtiness and sinuous hypocrisy are brilliantly explored.
He’s an easy man to find repellent and Iain Glen (who also directs with a sure touch) has cast himself against type. Glen was built to play wench-tupping rotters, and by giving Manders a large dose of sexual charisma he adds layers of complexity and pathos to the role. Love shunning beauty is more tragic, and more unnatural, than love shunning deformity. With his feline good looks and tufty moustacheless beard Glen looks a bit like Alan Hansen playing Abraham Lincoln. He’s ably supported by Lesley Sharp as a pained and tremulous Mrs Alving. Just occasionally the show has an attack of the vapours and becomes melodramatic. When Mrs Alving sees apparitions she slows to a halt centre-stage, like Veronica facing Jesus, her arms uplifted in supplication. And Oswald has a spectacular fit on the chaise-longue where he rolls around like an overstuffed hot-dog dribbling grease and spittle everywhere.
Those quibbles apart, this is a first-class production and a must-see for anyone who likes their Ibsen served straight without modernist interventions from botch-job directors. I wish it well, although I worry that it may fall foul of the West End’s First Law of Photo-dynamics. The weightier the play, the brighter the star needed to propel it into profit. Ibsen is at the heavier end of the periodic table and, while Iain Glen is a treasured stage personality, he’s avoided the career of the Hollywood sequeliser playing the sort of big-buck roles that would sell this show out every night. He hasn’t been a hobbit or a wizard, a Bond baddie, a romcom heartbreaker or a Hogwarts stalwart. It’s a lamentable oddity that the show would be more bankable if the star had served time prancing around Pinewood in a cape.
To the Royal Court for Bola Agbaje’s latest play. Agbaje is a fresh and fascinating new voice and she takes a big risk in Off the Endz. Her central character has no redeeming features whatever. David Damola is a violent, faithless, blinkered, self-pitying, manipulative, needy, chauvinistic crybaby. We first meet him after his release from prison and his mission is to renounce his past and create a viable future for himself, but he immediately sets about destroying the happiness of his best buddy by drawing him into a doomed drug scam. The play’s ending is predictable, the narrative is unsubtly linear and the structure feels very wonky. Characters are introduced and tossed aside too lightly. Some scenes drag on and there’s a shouty, state-aided preachiness about the message — ‘cram doan pay, na mean?’ — as if the show were intended for city academies that have missed their targets on pregnancies and stabbings. I could imagine Ed Balls sitting through this wearing a scowl of gruesome approbation. It’s the moral equivalent of free school meals. Occasionally, Agbaje shows glimpses of her great comic talent. When a gang of ten-year-olds chases an older hood off their patch the play becomes hilarious and disturbing. And when David invents a back story to conceal his drug-dealing career he claims to be ‘an agent for bouncers’. These are rare treats in a rushed and unsophisticated script.
As David, Ashley Walters pulls off the amazing feat of making the worthless scuzz-ball rather likeable. Walters has a remarkable stage presence, a reptilian charm, a lusty malevolence, a sense of menace, authority and deranged humour. His eyes are very unpleasant yet somehow very sweet, too. It would be fascinating to see him dislodged from his urban habitat playing something other than a yoof with Reeboks and attitude. This play hasn’t diminished my enthusiasm for Agbaje’s writing and I’ll be first in the queue for her next play, but with its ramshackle set and artless structure this one looks as if it was heading for the Theatre Upstairs and got out at the wrong floor.
Comments