Gary Owen's 'powerful' retelling of Ibsen's scandalous tale

The Welsh playwright Gary Owen has an impressive track record of "hot-wiring the classics" and "taking them on a white-knuckle joyride around 21st-century issues", said Rachel Halliburton in The Sunday Times. He has previously reimagined "Iphigenia", "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Cherry Orchard"; now he has produced a "powerful" adaptation of Ibsen's 1881 play "Ghosts". Its themes – venereal disease, incest and suicide – were so shocking back then that booksellers banned it and no Norwegian theatre would stage it: the play had its premiere in Chicago in 1882. Owen's update is a "cracker" – as "fresh as it's twisted", said Robert Gore-Langton in the Mail on Sunday. "I was taken aback by its inventiveness and the amount of comedy that a delighted audience discovered."

In this era of anything goes, it's tough to "deliver a 'Ghosts' spooked by taboos", said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. But this one pulls it off. Directed by Rachel O'Riordan, it retains the "toxic power" of the original – and it "will grip whether you know the play or don't". The setting here is not the dank Norwegian coast, but a mansion in an equally dank corner of rural Britain, said Nick Curtis in London's The Standard. Syphilis is the malignant inheritance at the centre of Ibsen's tragedy. Here, instead, the play looks at how sexual and physical abuse resonate through the generations – and it makes for a "wrenching, scorching piece of theatre". Among a fine cast, Victoria Smurfit – as the newly widowed Helena – lets "more and more grief emerge from her frozen control", said Sarah Crompton on What's on Stage. And Callum Scott Howells is "magnificent" as her son Oz, a failed actor who "flounces and bites" but can't hide his longing for love.

Alas, I found the evening "frustrating", said Clive Davis in The Times. The reworking "seesaws between melodrama and awkward comedy", while the actors play "second fiddle to the visuals" – "emoting at each other" across the cavernous, modernist set. It's ambitious, but it doesn't quite convince.

by Hallie Rubenhold 

One night in 1910, an American quack doctor murdered his wife Belle Elmore, dismembered her body and buried it in the cellar of their north London home. He and his lover, Ethel Le Neve, then tried to flee to Canada, only to be foiled by a message sent from their ship via the new-fangled wireless telegraph; after a sensational trial, the doctor, Hawley Crippen, was hanged while Ethel walked free. The story is, of course, a familiar one; yet in her new book, Hallie Rubenhold makes it exciting all the same, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. Rather than put Crippen centre stage, she focuses on his victim and his suspected accomplice: Belle, often depicted as blowsy and shrewish, is treated with gentle compassion, while Ethel is compellingly mysterious. The author also brilliantly evokes their milieu – the music halls in which Belle sang, the boom in homoeopathy that Crippen exploited, and the thrilling novelty of instant communications. It's a "thoughtful, humane and gripping" book.

Rubenhold has delivered belated justice for Belle, said Jennifer Wright in The New York Times. Contemporary newspapers presented Crippen as a meek man driven to murder by a grand passion and an impossible wife. In fact, he ruthlessly exploited vulnerable people with his snake-oil cures; he forced his first wife, Charlotte, into multiple abortions and may have killed her too. He would almost certainly have got away with Belle's murder but for her "fascinating" circle of bohemian friends – including a tightrope walker and a circus rider – and their determination to establish the truth.

This is a story of restlessness, aspiration and thwarted ambition, said Lucy Lethbridge in the Times Literary Supplement. The characters are perpetually on the brink of ruin or riches, changing their names at the drop of a hat: Crippen's aliases included Cuppen, Franckel and Robinson. He emerges as a man "shaped by contradictions" – capable of small kindnesses and great charm, but also coldly calculating, with an eye for female vulnerability. The book takes in a "dizzying" range of locations, said Nigel Andrew in the Literary Review, and the descriptions of these places rather clog the narrative. Where it really pays dividends is in its account of Belle and her music-hall career; but Ethel, too, springs to life as a woman whose ruthlessness matched her lover's. Rubenhold reminds us of the "hideous" reality of murder and its ripple effect on family and friends, while providing the murdered woman with a fitting and "deeply sympathetic" memorial.

Modernising pontiff who took the Gospel to the margins

Pope Francis I, who has died aged 88, was the first Pope from the Americas, and the first from outside Europe for 1,200 years. He was also the first to live at the Vatican around the corner from his predecessor, said The Telegraph, having been elected following the shock resignation of Benedict XVI – and the first Jesuit to lead the Roman Catholic Church. Known for his belief in social justice, he marked himself out with his informal style. Instead of moving into the papal apartments, he remained in the Vatican guest house; and was soon seen driving around in an old Renault 4.

His first pastoral visit outside Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where he met asylum seekers from Africa and condemned the "global indifference" to their fate and that of others like them. He wanted, he said, to bring the Gospel to the "peripheries", to society's margins. He travelled widely, visiting hot spots including Myanmar and Iraq, and appointed 20 cardinals from countries including Rwanda and Tonga that had never previously had them. In his encyclicals, he sought to move the Church on from arguments about sexual morality, and to focus its mission on fighting climate change and global poverty.

Many Catholics adored him, said The Times. But mainstream conservatives were angered by many of his reforms. In the US in particular, they objected to his attacks on the excesses of capitalism; and they were "alarmed" by the ambiguity of his statements on moral issues. "Who am I to judge?" he told a journalist in 2013, when asked about gay priests. Though welcomed by progressives, this remark did not signal the start of radical reforms. He opposed gay marriage and gay adoption, and he was steadfast on the sanctity of human life. But he urged priests to welcome gay parishioners; he expressed support for same-sex civil unions; and he said that priests could give same-sex couples spontaneous "non-liturgical" blessings. For some Catholics, he often seemed to go too far; for others, not far enough, said The New York Times. 

Jorge Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 into an Italian immigrant family. His parents, who were middle class, though not well-off, spoke Spanish at home, but Jorge learnt Italian from his grandparents. At school, he excelled at chemistry. Outside it, he loved football and the tango. His mother hoped he would become a doctor; but aged 16, he walked into a church and realised, he said, that God was waiting for him there. At 21, he suffered severe pneumonia and had to have part of a lung removed. Soon afterwards, he entered a Jesuit seminary, and after 11 years of training he was ordained.

In 1973, he was appointed to lead the Jesuits in Argentina; three years later, the brutal military junta took over. Two of his priests were arrested while working in a slum area, and tortured during five months of detention. His enemies would later spread rumours that he'd abandoned the pair, said The Guardian. In fact, he had petitioned the military leaders to release them; he'd also helped others to flee Argentina. However, his failure to denounce the junta, or embrace radical liberation theology, alienated him from his order, as did his authoritarian leadership style. As a result, he was sent into a form of internal exile; he emerged with a more compassionate, more consultative approach. In 1992, he was made auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, in which role he affirmed his commitment to the poor. In 1998, he became archbishop.

He was relieved not to be made Pope in 2005 (he said that a faction had backed him, in a bid to block Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict); but when Ratzinger stood down, he was deemed the right man to restore a Church reeling from a series of crises, including the clerical-abuse scandal. In that regard, he committed some serious errors – such as defending a Chilean bishop who had been accused of covering up a priest's abuse. Following a backlash, he admitted to having made a "grave mistake", and reached out to the abuse victims he had accused of slander. 

His advancing age did not hold him back: one of his last visits, in 2023, was to South Sudan and DR Congo; nor did ill health stop his political interventions. In February, he wrote a letter criticising Donald Trump's plans for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants. "All I am trying to do is advance the Gospel," he once said. "But imperfectly, because sometimes I make mistakes."