Ghosts

Lesley Sharp is magnetic as Mrs Alving, the tormented woman at the heart of Henrik Ibsen's troubling play. A torn, distraught mother, cruelly betrayed wife, rejected lover and free-thinker who has never had the latitude to allow her intellect to expand, she's trapped in her elegant home with its rain-streaked windows, and, in Sharp's fascinating performance, tremulous with the disgust and pain she has repressed within herself for so many years. You see the strain of that suffering from the moment Sharp appears onstage in Iain Glen's production: she seems febrile, breathless, her hands restless and fluttery. Yet there's steel, a toughness born of long endurance, in her manner when she defends her progressive taste in reading matter to Glen's censorious Pastor Manders; and at the mere sound of her son Oswald's tread upon the stair, she is transfigured, her features illuminated by love.

The difficulty is that nothing else in Glen's directorial debut quite matches up. Ibsen's tale of the Alvings' sham marriage, of the dead Captain Alving's philandering and the congenital syphilis he has passed on to his artistically inclined son here suffers from an unevenness of tone. Frank McGuinness's new version is earthily direct, but the production risks tipping into melodrama. Glen's Manders is so hectoring, so thunderously evangelical and dogmatic that it's almost impossible to imagine that Sharp's intelligent Mrs Alving ever thought she might find comfort in his arms. And Harry Treadaway as the disintegrating Oswald has an artificial air that detracts from the horror of his fate.

The scene between Engstrand (Malcolm Storry), the alcoholic carpenter, and Regine (Jessica Raine), who believes he is her father but is in fact Alving's illegitimate daughter, raised in his house as a servant, opens the production with a bracing, salty energy. Storry's Engstrand is a wily, weathered old conniver and Raine's Regine a cool little opportunist. But their lively exchange gives way to a too often over-deliberate staging, that can make the expression of passions too much like play acting. Real intensity comes only when Sharp, confronted with Oswald's rapid decline, struggles between keening emotional collapse and desperate denial. Glen's production needs more potency and cogency; but Sharp's is a performance with the power to haunt.