As women marched the streets demanding the right to vote in 1879, Ibsen outraged society by writing the play A Doll's House in which its central character, Nora, walks out on her husband and doesn't follow the pattern of much nineteenth-century literature of women rebelling and then dying at the end of the story.
Some wanted it banned. Others said Ibsen had gone too far and should have a sequel in which Nora returns and looks after her children like a good wife.
Ibsen refused to do that, but his next play, Ghosts, in 1881, illustrated why such a return to an abusive, sexist man would not work in a claustrophobic, oppressive society that created the abusive sexism. It centres on Helen, who had tried to walk away from her dissolute husband, Captain Alving, many years before, but was persuaded to return.
Gary Owen has written brilliant versions of classic plays. However, his contemporary riff on Ibsen’s Ghosts, set in modern times, shifts away from an exposé of society into a melodrama about incest and possible rape with lots of jokes that had the audience rolling with laughter and not worrying about any serious stuff such as incest or potential rape.
When the character Oz (Callum Scott Howells), son of Helena (Victoria Smurfit), finds out he has been having sex with the maid, Reggie, who he didn't know was his sister, he gets a huge laugh by pointing out such an act isn’t even fit for porn sites. Reggie's final action with him after learning he is her brother is to kiss him goodbye and emphasise her decision to end contact with him by spitting on the floor. The trauma of the moment is lost in audience laughter as Helena immediately starts cleaning it away, saying, “someone has got to sit on that.”
In Ibsen’s version, Helen has rejected religion and is reading radical pamphlets, usually assumed to be feminist, that appal the local clergyman. Gary Owen has Helena instead reading the Bible, with the visiting lawyer being the more sceptical.
The show has a good cast and a very effective minimal set in which the side walls are adorned with pictures of the back of a man’s head and fog swirls behind the back screen. Although it spends some two hours and thirty minutes dipping very lightly into various issues with lots of jokes, it does try to deliver those issues educationally. Twice, we are given a character explaining the way abuse can be ambiguous when the woman who doesn’t want sex feels she cannot say so.
As for the incest, Reggie (Patricia Allison) explains that according to the 2006 act on the subject, it isn’t a crime to have sex with a family member if you didn’t know they were a family member.
This show may lack substance, have very little focus beyond the odd revelation of incest and possible sexual abuse, but it does get the audience laughing.