MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Ghosts, Royal and Derngate Northampton
The contradiction between private vice and public virtue resonates in a new production of Henrik Ibsen's insightful drama
Troubled matriarch: Penny Downie as Helen Alving
[Sheila Burnett]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
“TO LIVE is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain,” Henrik Ibsen opined in the privacy of a letter when writing Ghosts. “To write: this is to sit in judgement over oneself.”
Publicly, though, he argued that “in none of my plays is the author so completely absent as in this last one.”
But most telling of all is neither of these statements but the contradiction between them. The Royal and Derngate’s production of Ghosts, in a new adaptation by Mike Poulton, brings the play’s message of the conflict between the public and private spheres to the fore.
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