Ghosts (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) London Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (5)
See it if you love intense plays with alot of insinuation and untold secrets
Don't see it if if you find hard hitting stuff like rape or insest or hardship in families is hard to watch
See it if You like a slow burner analysing human psyche. It has just one act for 1.5 hours.
Don't see it if You prefer it to be devoid of laughs. This has some black humour which sometimes felt awkward in an atmospheric play.
See it if Over-the-top dramatic, full of high angst. Always wonderful to watch a show at Sam Wanamaker's candlelight theatre.
Don't see it if You want something light, not intense family drama.
See it if you like the Shakespeare Globe. The only thing that kind of safe the play and didn't make me leave was the amazing setting, candle light.
Don't see it if you don't want to be bored. the story...is simple and badly written. Nothing new. There people sleeping on their seats.
See it if You like Ibsen and don't think his work should be covered in dust and played against Victorian settings.
Don't see it if You're an absolute purist, and don't want an adaptation that is mired in Victorian speech.
Critic Reviews (11)
“Hattie Morahan leads a fine cast and brings her flair for tamped-down, volcanic emotion to the part of Helene Alving, trying to control the damage her terrible sea-captain husband wreaked on her and his offspring...She’s part of a production that makes Ghosts feel poignant and fresh rather than absurd, and that’s no mean feat.”
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“A lot of directors like to put you through the wringer with ‘Ghosts’. In a way Hill-Gibbins goes for the opposite with a production that’s like a warm glass of barbiturates before a slip into oblivion.”
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“It is a production full of clever concepts: I walked away in admiration rather than devastated by its closing moments.”
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“Ibsen’s play achieves a brilliant narrative layering whereby all five characters in differing ways have the goods on one another...Hill-Gibbins manages precisely that without lapsing into melodrama – always a risk with this text.”
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“There are flashes of wit, but there is no hope here to offset all the gloom. So there is no tension. This well-crafted but overgloomy evening left me feeling I was trapped in a radio play I couldn’t turn off.”
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“This streamlined new version, adapted and directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, is accessible and absorbing, focusing on themes of coercive control and cycles of abusive behaviour, but balancing the grim content with plenty of pitch-black comedy.”
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“The stranglehold of past misdemeanours on present-day lives, the ‘sins of the fathers’ being visited upon the offspring, and the irresponsibility of men imperilling women’s lives are dramatic themes that resonate down the ages, and ‘Ghosts’ remains a gripping, involving watch. Hill-Gibbins’s bold, bleakly funny but intelligent reimagining of this little theatrical chamber of family horrors is compulsive and quietly revelatory. Haunting stuff.”
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“ ‘Ghosts’ the play cannot escape the past, but this production lives persuasively in the present.”
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