Bumps with ghosts

Following my mention of bumps on 7th October, we returned to Kingston for another round on Tuesday. I bumped first, scoring 4 on the way up. BH went down scoring a modest three. She started very well but lost it a bit after her first bump, although she held it together enough to win on points.

In the break, rather than go to lunch, we went to 'Ghosts' at the Rose. We had been prepped by the recent outing to 'The Doll's House' (see 1st September), reading this work and reading various reviews. These last were a trifle mixed, and I remember comments about the stage being too large and the break for the interval being in the wrong place.

It certainly did not go as well as the doll for some reason, and the first half seemed rather too long, but it picked up well enough in the short second half - despite this last having taken considerable liberties with the text, making much explicit which the original had left implicit and uncertain. Not an improvement to my mind. But the reviewer did have a point about the interval, albeit not quite the one that I am making. He also had a point about the stage which seemed too wide for the amount of action and the number of people involved. It all worked rather better at the rather narrower Duke of York's; maybe the play gets lost in the round and needs the confinement of the proscenium arch.

And it did not go well enough to make one forget the cheap construction of the seats, the pairing of which seemed to make for a lot of creaking. Perhaps three mobile phones went off during the performance, perhaps reflecting the number of young people - perhaps doing their A-levels - in the audience. Which about half filled the auditorium this mid-week evening.

But as with the doll, there were some real issues and some real characters. What sort of a man will take on the by-blow got by a gentleman from a servant girl? How much will he want to take the job on? How far does the duty of a wife who has failed to please her husband go? What drives people to throw tainted money away, rather than put it to some good use? Is it right to free someone from a miserable and degrading death by helping him (or her) to a touch of morphine? What sort of a person would be able to provide help of this sort? And what sort would not? What happens when you treat a servant like one of the family? Is it better to keep distinctions clear, to keep expectations under control? All kinds of interesting stuff which make the play a good one for A-level study. But somehow, it did not seem quite as relevant (to me anyway) as the doll had: servants and by-blows are things of the past for nearly all of us, as are the class conventions of the middle classes of the second half of the nineteenth century. We just have an epidemic of unmarried mothers instead.

We plan to see (with restricted view) what the Almeida make of it all in due course.