Cathy Marston un-veiled Ghosts at the Linbury Theatre in 2005 on the eve of her departure as the Royal Opera House’s Artistic Associate. In 2008 she plays it at the awakening dawn of her new company in Bern. It is, I believe, her masterpiece thus far and though in the intervening years the piece’s structure has changed but little, its nuances and sonorities, its contours and emphases, have altered and morphed with Marston’s own deepening maturity. Then, when new, the work’s central role – that of Oswald Alving, the syphilis-ridden son upon whom the sins of the father are met – was played by that fine dramatic dancer Matthew Hart who invested into the part a kaleidoscope of pains and angst that charted the agonies of Ibsen’s creation. Since then, via Omar Gordon in its second revival, Marston has been draining the part of Hart’s extravagances and this Bern revival (referred to as Gespenster by those of a German speaking disposition) is the most emotionally barren, yet fiercely poetical performance I have seen and the result is to raise the work to Grecian proportions in its contemplation of love, memory and death.

Her performers occupy the stage as hollow souls, driven onward by the inevitability of destruction and Marston’s dance. In Edward Kemp’s dramaturgy the past and present inter-weave and the work’s Anagnorisis (the moment of tragic realization) is played not as in Ibsen with the final recognition of Oswald’s fate with the rising of the sun, but as a series of remembrances which haunt, as a ghost, the mind of Mrs Alving and her younger self. Marston places these moments of temporal collision as antagonistic duets at each side of the stage and the Stadttheater’s tight proscenium emphasises (more than was possible on the wider Linbury stage) the structural cohesion that binds them. The impression is one of darkness and light, of day and night, of life and death. (Before arriving in Bern, I spent some days in Florence and Pontormo’s “Annunciation” and “Deposition” in the Chapel of Santa Felicita have the same effect of chiaroscuro.)

The Bern company boasts some of Ghosts’ original dancers: Jenny Tattersall and Martina Langmann reprising their roles of Regina and her mother Johanna, each offering the truest drama through the simplest of means, painfully vivid; Omar Gordon returning to his created role of Pastor Manders is a rock around which the drama unfurls. And in its newest recruits – Paula Alonso, Hui-Chen Tsai as the Mrs Alvings, Chieng-Ming Chang as Oswald and Erik Guillard as Captain Alving – Marston has found dancers who are beginning to understand her intelligent and captivating response to drama present in her hybrid style of dance. There is also an inevitable response to Dave Maric’s challenging, though surprisingly Romantic, score which is bound so closely to the fabric of Marston’s work. No more was this apparent than when at the public rehearsal the orchestra (OPUS – Bern, conducted by Alexander Martin) scratched its way through the notes and the result was choreographic muddle. Fast-forward to the first-night proper and a first-rate performance, the inflections of Maric’s music matching those on stage and the result was choreographic bliss.

Dancers: Alonso, Chang, Gordon, Guillard, Langmann, Tattersall, Tsai

Having been fortunate to see a bit of early rehearsal for "Ghosts" when out there, I am not surprised to hear you report how well the company performed - and I really do not want to wait until they get to the Linbury next year before seeing them again!