With season three of The White Lotus, London’s two recent Oedipuses, and now this extraordinary show, revelations of incest that make an audience gasp and squirm seem to be having a moment. Gary Owen’s gripping contemporary version of Henrik Ibsen’s airless 1881 drama is quite astonishing, not least in its use of humour to defray the fatalism and ponderous foreshadowing of the original.
Rachel O’Riordan’s production is impeccably cast, with riveting central performances from Rivals/Cold Feet star Victoria Smurfit — returning to the stage after 17 years away — as Helena and It’s a Sin’s Callum Scott Howells as her son Oz. It stumbles slightly towards the end but remains a wrenching, scorching piece of theatre. Did I mention it’s also horribly funny?
We’re in a mansion somewhere in the British countryside — the accents aren’t a clear guide — where Helena is about to endow a hospital for sick children with the fortune left by her late, abusive husband Carl. Smooth lawyer Andersen (Rhashan Stone), a former boyfriend she threw over, is handling the details. Designer Merle Hensel decks the set’s side walls with back views of Carl’s thuggish head, while the rear is all smoke and murk.
Oz, an intermittently successful and terminally self-centred actor, has come home for the hospital opening. He’s scratchy with his mother but finds a blossoming ease with her assistant and his childhood playmate Reggie (Patricia Allison of Sex Education), who is the daughter of his late nanny and the local handyman. Or so everyone says.
Ibsen’s themes, about the way abuse begets abuse and the hypocrisy of the pious, prove effortlessly relevant to our times. Pretty much everyone is compromised here, or exposed for their selfishness, and there are fresh potshots at gentrification and the corruption of the rich. Knowledge of the original isn’t essential to thoroughly enjoy this version, but it does enable you to spot felicities and occasional jarring notes.
Oz the actor hoping for a callback from a streaming platform is a neat substitute for Oswald the wannabe painter in Bohemian Paris in 1881, and the job-change also gives a theatre audience a nice, in-jokey glow. Lawyers like Andersen today enjoy the same dubious authority as Ibsen’s Pastor Manders.
In this antibiotic age, though, Owen has to diverge from Ibsen’s symbol of inherited vice, syphilis. This leads him, intriguingly, into a debate on consent that’s brought electrically alive by Smurfit. The legacy of shame is psychological rather than physical here, and it doesn’t entirely ring true that Oz should emulate or exceed his father’s debasement. It feels like Owen is groping towards an equivalence he can’t entirely grasp.
Even the most psychologically acute moments remain fair game for humour. One character is horrified to have committed an act that even online porn aggregators consider beyond the pale: another takes comfort from the insertion of the word “wittingly” in the section concerning incest in the 2006 Sexual Offences Act. O’Riordan navigates the laughs and the horror of it all beautifully, and she has a great cast helping her.
Smurfit is magnetic in expensive cream athleisurewear, hair artfully sleeked and cheekbones burnished like a battle visor: she’s not afraid to appear hard and unlikeable. Scott-Howells is an edgy and fascinating actor, always pushing the envelope of what is permissible. Stone, ever-dependable, is terrific here. Allison, part of the extraordinary talent school that was Sex Education, has a quietly compelling authority on stage. Deka Walmsley completes a fine cast as her father Jacob. Well, when I say ‘father’…
Ghosts at the Lyric Hammersmith, to 10 May, lyric.co.uk.