Rosmersholm
Duke of York’s Theatre, London

Ghosts
Royal & Derngate, Northampton

Atheatre wanting a story about Brexit or euthanasia would probably commission a living writer. But why bother, when Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), history’s second greatest playwright after Shakespeare, wrote both almost 150 years ago? His long-ago plays for today are Rosmersholm and Ghosts, domestic tragedies each turning on a Norwegian clergyman.

Rosmersholm (1886), for unavoidable historical reasons, did not initially deal with the UK’s attempted departure from the EU. But Duncan Macmillan’s new version, for Ian Rickson’s starry West End revival, has beadily seen the topicalities of a drama in which conservatives and liberals are fighting an election, in a country riven by internal divisions and external suspicions, at a time of tense national redefinition. (Ibsen was writing about Norway’s border and identity disputes within Scandinavia.)