Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Ghosts, Royal and Derngate Northampton
The contradiction between private vice and public virtue resonates in a new production of Henrik Ibsen's insightful drama
PIC CAP Troubled matriarch: Penny Downie as Helen Alving Pic: Sheila Burnett
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
“TO LIVE is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain,” Henrik Ibsen opined in the privacy of a letter when writing Ghosts. “To write: this is to sit in judgement over oneself.”
Publicly, though, he argued that “in none of my plays is the author so completely absent as in this last one.”
But most telling of all is neither of these statements but the contradiction between them. The Royal and Derngate’s production of Ghosts, in a new adaptation by Mike Poulton, brings the play’s message of the conflict between the public and private spheres to the fore.
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