“GHOSTS”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 998, 14 June 1930, Page 24

“GHOSTS”

Ibsen Revival by Sybil Thorndike

SPLENDID PERFORMANCE

Ibsen's “Ghosts” has been revived in London with Sybil Thorndike as Mrs. Alving.

Heije is a London critic’s opinion of the play and the players. Ibsen did not suffer fools gladly, nor could he abide the smug, the sly, or the phrase-mongering spoil-sports of life. His scorn for them seethes through this grisly drama of inherited disease even above the pathological ferment, and shows what dramatic fruit a righteous refusal to love one’s neighbour can bear. As he sets out the plan of the Alving tragedy, that visitation of the sins of the father upon the son, and leads Pastor Manders up the garden into the prepared ambush, one thrills to the dramatic art with, which he scores his first direct hit—that echo by Oswald and Regina from the dining-room of the ghosts who were their forbears.

The conflagration at the Orphanage that fires the second act, even Oswald’s pitiful cry for the sun that concludes the third act, are coups de theatre that complement but do not eclipse this first fine stroke. But it is less as instructive realism that we approach this awful play than as a theatrical tour de force which gives fine actors such worthy opportunities. One might have expected so redoubtable a tragedienne as Sybil Thorndike, for whom the heroics of Hecuba are mere child’s play, to blow Mrs. Alving into histrionic smithereens. She does nothing of the kind, hut subdues the native mettle of her daemon to the gentler paces of this widowed mother in a very fine and sensitive performance. She is admirably supported by Stanley Howlett, whose Pastor Manders is neither boring in his didacticism nor ridiculous in defeat; by Alfred Clark, who discovers unusually good humour in that limping two-faced recreant, Jacob Engstrand; and by Hubert Langley, whose Oswald is imaginative and pitiful. Mary Grew, with a set rather than a flexible mastery of Regina, smoulders somewhat sullenly. “Ghosts” is not a play one would care to see less than capably performed. This Everyman production is not only the best I have seen, but retrieves some of the repertorial faux pas that have preceded it.