RETURNING home after a thoroughly good evening's miserable Ibsen watching, thinking of John Peel as a radio tribute ended with The Undertones' singing "Teenage kicks so hard to beat", it was a night when all life (and death) was here.

On late-night Grumpy Old Men, Arthur Smith was mithering about how everything now had to be fast, fast, fast; no one could sit and do nothing any more.

John Peel listed staring out of windows as one of his hobbies in Who's Who, and there was plenty of that in Henrik Ibsen's slow, slow, slow Ghosts, where prodigal son Oswald Alving (Andrew Cryer), an artist afflicted with syphilis, never lifts a finger to paint the easel that remains blank all play.

Behind him, the rain falls incessantly upon the window pane of Philip Witcomb's set, chiming with Ibsen's sentiment that Ghosts is a "family story as sad and grey as this rainy day". In 1881, no Scandinavian theatre would stage Ibsen's dark, taboo-busting tale of adultery, incest and euthanasia. In 1891, the Daily Telegraph frothed and foamed that "Ibsen's melancholy and malodorous world was a loathsome sore unbandaged".

Harrogate Theatre artistic director Hannah Chissick would prefer to call Ibsen "truly a playwright ahead of his time".

Certainly the ghosts of Ghosts haunt the present in Ibsen's assessment of human nature, especially male weakness.

Outside, in Witcomb's design, a huge sky changes from day to night and day again, and Mrs Alving's house is full of windows and open, glass roofs, and yet inside the atmosphere is crepuscular. Grumpy old man of the cloth Pastor Manders (Chris Barnes) is moaning: "All this demanding to be happy in life; what right do people have to happiness?" No doubt Arthur Smith would concur, and in Ghosts the pursuit of happiness is indeed impossible and futile.

Mrs Alving (Helen Weir), dressed in foreboding black throughout, can only watch as the sins of her adulterous, deceitful husband resurface in her reckless son, his heart struck on the calculating, upwardly mobile maid Regine (Anna Hope), while Norwegian woodman Egstrand (Frank Ellis) spots his chance for blackmail.

What a crushing play it is: so much so that the set contracts for the third act, as Oswald's world suffocates him.

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Updated: 11:11 Wednesday, October 27, 2004