‘Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous … loathsome … too horrible. Lacking common decency and abhorrent’. Just a few of the barbed comments that greeted the original London production of Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ in 1891. These days such colourful reviews would be more likely to draw an audience to the theatre in their droves than drive it away. But what was it that so shocked – and continues to unsettle – those who saw and see this play for the first time? Was it the way it exposed the dark secrets that lurked beneath the seeming decency of a respectable family? Perhaps that struck a cord with those who had a past to hide. Or was it that its two female characters – young feisty Regina and the redoubtable Helene Alving – were prepared to stand up to and challenge the conventions of their day, whatever the consequences: particularly chauvinistic male authority. Maybe it was that the play poked the bear of religious intolerance and hypocrisy that can be a feature of orthodox religions. More likely it was that the play tackles tough themes such as assisted dying, incest, prostitution, and seamy corruption. These days audiences are made of sterner stuff. (Plots of TV soaps have seen to that!). And ‘Ghosts’ has been a major work in the repertory canon of local and national theatres for generations, attracting our leading actors to interpret the five full-blooded characters that Ibsen created for us: Helene Alving, Pastor Manners, Oswald, Jacob Engstrand and Regina. Modern theatre goers also discover that ‘Ghosts’ is a play of light as well as shade. (There is humour!); not ‘irremediably bleak’. It is full of tension and surprises; continually engrossing. This recent translation, first produced by Richard Eyre, is fast-paced, intense and gripping. And it still has the capacity to shock even in 2024.