By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****1/2

WHEN? Saturday 12 April, opens 16 April runs through 10 May 2025 RUNTIME 155 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Playwright Gary Owen explains his modern take on this beloved Ibsen in the programme: ‘There is a point to messing with a classic – if you get it right, you might preserve what was truly startling about the original. You might reproduce the impact this dusty old classic had when it was a snarling, swaggering young play.’

• Read on for reasons including how you couldn’t ask for a more intense performance than star Scott Howells serves up

Ghosts was written in 1882 and struck out is the venereal disease inherited by the character Oz here from his unfaithful father, given an extraordinarily vivid portrayal by Callum Scott Howells (Cabaret, It’s A Sin and A View From The Bridge), and instead greater emphasis is placed on his relationship with his mother’s employee Reggie, played by Patricia Allison (pictured left below).

Oz’s mother Helena, given life by the excellent Victoria Smurfit, is in the final throes of masterminding the building of a hospital to be named after her late former husband and her solicitor Andersen, a probing Rhashan Stone, starts to unpick the lies the widow has comforted herself with about her relationship.

Deka Walmsley plays handyman Jacob, Reggie’s father, who proposes she goes into business with him to remove her from Helena’s orbit because he thinks her influence is leading his daughter astray.

Scott Howells’ pampered actor Oz is indulgently privileged and returns home demanding to know why his mother sent him away to boarding school as a child while at the same time taking his relationship to another level.

Owen’s language is wonderfully modern day and as far removed from this ‘dusty old classic’ as anyone would wish with Scott Howells concerned his present is beyond anything Pornhub would feature and Smurfit’s Helena unravelling amid the coercion and abuse she has been subjected to.

This Ghosts is not an easy watch and as if to accentuate the words rather than anything else we are presented with an almost padded room of a box set painted white with little other than a sofa and a cabinet to hold alcohol that flows freely as secrets and lies come home to roost.

Allison’s Reggie is as devastated as Scott Howells’ electric Oz to discover the truth about their relationship that Smurfit’s crumbling yet occasionally steely Helena has conspired to obscure.

There’s a mirrored back wall to the staging which beautifully conveys the fog of the location which is also metaphorical and occasionally we glimpse characters attempting to negotiate the pea-souper as they flail ever more lost in their attempts to negotiate it.

Owen has worked with director Rachel O’Riordan, also artistic director of this venue, to much acclaim previously and we reviewed their Romeo and Julie, also starring Scott Howells at the National’s Dorfman Theatre in 2023.

For us this is by far the better of the collaborations we have seen and left this preview audience gasping in shock at the story that was unfolding before them.

If Owen’s ambition was to recreate the feel of what it was like to see this as ‘a snarling, swaggering young play’ he nailed it and couldn’t have asked for a more intense performance than star Scott Howells serves up.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith Tickets
• Have you seen a Callum Scott Howells show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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