Theatre

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new version of Ibsen’s drama is drippingly dispiriting. Rain trickles from the eaves of the Alving home, where a patriarch’s ghost refuses to lie down and those who survive him are imprisoned in a cycle of making each other and themselves miserable. Bijan Sheibani’s bland Arcola/ATC staging lacks tautness, and Lenkiewicz’s reworked text flattens the nuances out of the dialogue. There’s no tense expectation of the exposure of toxic secrets. Suzanne Burden’s Mrs Alving is a warmly sensual pragmatist. And as her son Osvald, Harry Lloyd is so wholesome and sensible that it seems odd that he and his uninhibited mother wouldn’t have had a heart-to-heart about the skeletons in the family closet long before. As Manders, Paul Hickey misses the poisonous hypocrisy and gives us just a priggish buffoon. There’s little sense of the sharpness of concealed suffering emerging – merely, at most, a dull ache.