Pre-20th century plays are often perceived to need a little help – modern dress, anachronistic translation – to make them work for 21st-century audiences. The governing brilliance of Richard Eyre's production of Henrik Ibsen's 1881 domestic tragedy Ghosts was to preserve the work within its own period, but make it seem urgently pertinent to our own as well.
The director was helped in this by the fact that Ibsen's subjects – hypocritical and misogynistic clerics and moralistic stigmatisation of certain illnesses – depressingly remain issues in our own society. Most remarkably, the climactic scene of the play – in which the widow Mrs Alving must choose whether to help her syphilis-riddled son to take an overdose of morphine – directly addresses one of the central ethical debates of our time: the right to what we now call assisted dying.
Where Eyre consciously modernised the work is in pacing: his version, which has since transferred to the West End and runs until 8 March came in at 90 minutes without an interval. This was a cinematic rhythm, and the semi-transparent set by Tim Hatley and shadow-conscious lighting by Peter Mumford added to the sense of a live performance of a film noir. This, though, was also fitting because Ibsen plotted his socially realistic plays like thrillers: the super-selling Scandinavian crime writer Jo Nesbo has acknowledged the great Norwegian dramatist as an inspiration.
Eyre also provided his own translation, which follows the decorum of the original in never spelling out the sexually transmitted disease that has infected Oswald Alving. Ibsen was vague because of social propriety and censorship; Eyre is oblique because he trusts the audience to understand the nuances, and because the condition from which the young man suffers therefore becomes more easily a metaphor for demonised illnesses closer to our own age.
The casting and acting were perfect: especially Lesley Manville as Mrs Alving, with the strength to defy her society in matters of sex, God and death. Equally good was Will Keen's Pastor Manders, who hides doubts and desires behind turgid certainty in a way recognisable in the figureheads of many religions present and past and also several non-clerical institutions.
However, the triumph is finally down to Eyre, who deservedly won the Evening Standard best director award for an evening in which performances, script, stage pictures and topical relevance fierily combine.
• Read Michael Billington's review of Ghosts
• Read more from the Best theatre of 2013 series
