ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Ackroyd & Harvey: The Art of Activism, The Lost Bus, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and Happyend
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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] 
MARY CONWAY relishes the spectacle of a domestic implosion in a setting strangely divorced from any social, political or cultural context
SUSAN DARLINGTON appreciates a retelling of the Merlin myth that emphasises family and belonging
JAN WOOLF is beguiled by the tempting notion that Freud psychoanalysed Hitler in a comedy that explores the vulnerability of a damaged individual
TONY BURKE reviews new releases from Cheikh Lo, Mishra & Deepa Shakthi, N’Faly Kouyate
Gin Lane by William Hogarth is a critique of 18th-century London’s growing funeral trade, posits DAN O’BRIEN
ANDY HEDGECOCK sees his scepticism lessened by a story is more complex and far-reaching than is initially apparent
“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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