Northampton to stage new version of Ibsen’s Ghosts

Published: 10 December 2018
Reporter: Steve Orme

Penny Downie who plays Helen Alving in Ghosts Credit: Idil Sukan

Pennie Downie and Pierro Niel-Mee will feature in the world première of Mike Poulton’s version of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts which will be staged at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate in April 2019.

Downie’s extensive credits include the role of Gertrude in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet in 2008. In Ghosts, she plays Helen Alving, the widow constrained for years by societal expectations who is determined to escape the ghosts of her past.

Niel-Mee plays her son Osvald. He was William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love on its 2018 tour as well as Agrippa in Poulton’s adaptation of Robert Harris’s Imperium in 2017.

Poulton’s plays include adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities for Royal and Derngate in 2016, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies in 2014 and a version of Ivan Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool in 2013.

Lucy Bailey will direct Ghosts. In Northampton, she directed Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight in 2015. Her production of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution is still running at London County Hall more than a year after it opened.

Ghosts will be on stage at Royal and Derngate from Friday 19 April until Saturday 11 May.

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