CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a new book that makes working class history come alive in a true story of human flesh and aspiration
Ghosts, Royal and Derngate Northampton
The contradiction between private vice and public virtue resonates in a new production of Henrik Ibsen's insightful drama
Troubled matriarch: Penny Downie as Helen Alving
[Sheila Burnett] 
GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a contemporary update of a problem play that raises more questions than it answers
New releases from Alice Di Micele, Tim Grimm, and Tereza Catarov
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by the stylistic muddle that arises when you apply a pub theatre sensibility to a towering Greek tragedy
ALAN McGUIRE welcomes a biography of the French semiologist and philosopher
ALEX HALL is frustrated by a book that ducks a clear definition of terrorism and fails to perceive the role of the state in sponsoring it
“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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