DIRECTOR Stephen Unwin is turning freelance after 15 years in charge at English Touring Theatre and now five at the Rose Theatre Kingston.

He ends on a high note with his new translation of Ibsen’s saga of love, betrayal and hypocrisy, a play banned in Britain until 1914 and once dismissed by the frothing Daily Telegraph as a “loathsome sore unbandaged”.

Maybe that was because Ibsen tackled not one, not two, but three taboos: adultery, incest and euthanasia. A century on, all three still cause a stir, and the “endless rain” still falls, but we also recognise that the melancholic Ibsen was ahead of his time in writing a “family story as sad and grey as this rainy day”.

Drawing upon Edvard Munch’s design for Ghosts in 1906, Simon Higlett’s set is suitably sad and grey with uncomfortable furniture and a weak fire, while Paul Pyant’s lighting adds to the claustrophobic gloom, as does the cloudy mountain backdrop.

Ibsen’s suffocating story of male weakness and misguided female resolves around prodigal son and artist Oswald Alving (Mark Quartley), returning home afflicted by the “living death” of syphilis. He is a ghost already, hollow, enervated, beyond working again, but also a reminder to his haunted mother (Kelly Hunter) of his errant, deceitful father, now that he is making reckless moves on the scheming maid Regina (Florence Hall).

Ghosts can be too earnest as well as miserable, but not here, where script, direction, dialogue delivery and performances are uniformly excellent and the domestic drama is disturbing, desperate, but never dreary, while both Pip Donaghy’s unctuous blackmailer Engstrand and Patrick Drury’s intolerant, lecherous zealot Pastor Manders chip out shards of the bleakest Ibsen black humour.

Ghosts, Rose Theatre Kingston/English Touring Theatre, at York Theatre Royal; 7.30pm tonight and 2.30pm, 7.30pm, tomorrow. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk