Ghosts

Almeida Theatre, London N1

5 Stars

"God and law are the cause of all the mischief in this world!"

With such a declaration, Henrik Ibsen saw through the hypocrisy of his time with a clarity so startling that it made him an enemy of both the critics and the censor.

In his play Ghosts, recreated for the Almeida by veteran director Richard Eyre, even the exquisitely moody set holds a mirror to itself.

A shimmering wall divides the space, with lighting rendering it transparent and opaque by turns. Not only does the action behind it take on a spectral appearance, it forms an echo, mirror and parallel with the foreground, a visual metaphor of which Ibsen would surely have approved.

As is the hallmark of his work, a woman - Helene Alving - is suffocating under a grotesque burden of patriarchal expectation.

Widowed by a contemptible and violent husband, she has contorted herself into an outward picture of marital respectability.

Having sent their son away in infancy to prevent his corruption, she leads him to believe by her letters that his father is of good character - an agonising lie which she maintains after his death.

The tension of the play is that such extreme self-negation will inevitably lead to a combustion of sorts, as Captain Alvin's "foulness" - venereal disease - is finally writ large on the innocent flesh of his own son.

Lesley Manville is exceptional as Helene with an almost supernatural ability to sink her eyes back into her own head, thus ageing by centuries as the relative brevity of the first act falls away.

While Will Keen's Pastor Manders, competent if one-dimensional, plays for laughs and leaves that character's moral complexity largely unexamined, the vivacious Charlene McKenna gives a perfectly pitched performance as the maid Regina Engstrand.

Yet it is Jack Lowden (pictured) as the Alvings' son, whose syphilitic madness in the final scene is simply soul-shattering, who carries off the acting honours. A performance and production that will linger in the mind.

Faye Lipson