Amazingly beautiful, magnificently acted, totally engrossing and tremendously fascinating, this Ibsen adaptation is another triumph for multi-award-winning writer Chris Bush and director Elin Scholfield, who together created the outstanding success of Standing at the Sky’s Edge and Rock, Paper, Scissors. Bush’s delicate makeover of A Doll’s House enthralls from start to finish, while the ravishing beauty and subtleties of set, sound design and music enhance mood and meaning to perfection throughout, thanks to Chiara Stephenson, Tingying Dong and Nicola T. Chang.
Henrik Ibsen was no feminist: his drama simply reflected reality, showing what life was like for women in nineteenth century Europe. But to sympathetically represent a woman’s viewpoint – and a woman from lowly beginnings at that – how very dare he! Storms of controversy and outrage blew up in 1879 in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, in which it was universally, most firmly decreed that women be beautiful, dutiful, devoted wives and mothers and nothing more; woe betide any who stepped out of line by expressing opinions, let alone taking action of their own initiative. On the surface, Nora Helmer is one such dutiful wife, lovingly devoted to serving her husband’s every desire and dictat. In secret, though, she’s taken out a loan, an illegal act for a woman, and into the bargain forged a signature. Now she must lie and deceive even though the selfless loan was for treatment that saved her husband’s life.
With costumes and decor in neat, handsome elegance whole-heartedly reflecting the nineteenth century, Bush’s adaptation retains the original era, while the story and dilemmas stay just the same, too. Modernised, though, but not at all outrageously, are the language and accents, while Nora’s demonstrative emotional side is, perhaps, a little less restrained.
The set is super-duper stunning. At the outset, a huge, apparently solid house towers up and spreads its neat, pale grey walls and windows across the stage at sharp angles, barely stopping short of the audience, where an ultra-shiny, black mirror of a moat fills the gap. Well, a man’s home is his castle – though for the woman perhaps it’s more of a prison. But the house’s solidity, like the solidity of the relationships inside, is an illusion. Wall-lights shimmer through the walls, then people can be seen, and when the great cage framework lifts on high we see the walls are really slight and diaphanous. Like a work of art the Doll’s House walls float above as action takes place below, in a room, adorned with long, upholstered stools, skinny animal-skin rug, neat baskets and a shining baby grand, decorated for Christmas. Richard Howell’s lighting enhances the set gloriously with wall-lights and candle-lit lanterns while fabulous shadows are brilliantly evocative at key moments.
Masterly, too, in creating an atmosphere of unease, suspense and tension, reminiscent of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Roald Dahl, is the music, much played live at the piano by Mel Lowe as maid Anna, or sounding out as subtle background tones, so that romantic tinklings quickly become edged with eerie suspense, rising in frenzy for Nora’s tarantella or descending at times, into the downright sinister and, in the last gasp of the updated finale, into breathtakingly blood-chilling.
In the eyes of the world, and superficially in their own eyes, Nora and Torvald Helmer have a perfect marriage, perfect home and perfect children, but eight years on, they’re forced to reveal and recognise sides of themselves their partner has been oblivious to, sides they hadn’t properly realised about themselves either. In the end, Nora fully understands that neither of them really knows the other at all and they’re more like lonely strangers. All was built on false foundations. In fact, in this intense character-driven drama no one is quite as they seem on the surface, nor quite what others think they are. All have been trapped, stifled and moulded by the demands of class, gender, life events and society’s rules, themes relevant to any generation.
A vibrant cast brings the characters and interactions convincingly to life, often through intimate, enticing dialogues between two characters. Initially scarily sinister as desperate villain and despicable would-be blackmailer, Nils Krogstad, is Eben Figueiredo, but his outward facade again belies what’s beneath. As the widower resumes his erstwhile relationship with Nora’s impoverished widow friend, Christina (another with secrets), played worthy, thoughtful and caring by Eleanor Sutton, we learn more of Krogstad until he softens to glow with elation, winning our sympathy after all. Another with emerging secrets is lovely, tragic Dr Rank, Aaron Anthony making him delightfully warm and amiable and (in contrast to Torvald) genuinely kind, considerate and loving.
Tom Glenister is a splendid Torvald, an embodiment of smart, upright, well-spoken, authoritative righteousness, joyously good-humoured and indulgent as long as his “little bird” wife, Nora, faultlessly plays her 2D role of rags-to-riches fairytale princess, a pretty airhead who leaves every last decision and opinion to her lord-and-master husband. He dictates how she should dress and even how she will dance and he’s already stopped her knitting. Knitting makes a woman adopt an unbecoming, hunched posture! Crochet is far more chic! If Nora oversteps the mark (as he sees it) by even a whisker, a more brutal side of Torvald instantly emerges, as when he crams treats into her mouth until they almost choke her. He loves her as a gorgeous bauble to show off, a pet, a poppet, a puppet, a doll, a caged bird, full of giggly, silly, sexy subservience and naivety who does always as he bids and is a paragon of virtue. But if she’s not that, his selfish sense of manly pride and honour will make him despise and reject her, though she’d still never believe that – until it happens.
Siena Kelly is a wonderfully engaging Nora, putting on her show of bubbling and burbling as the superficially frivolous airhead her husband is in love with, while realising more and more that deep inside her is a free spirit that rebels against the crass injustice of a society that allows women no power, authority or independent identity whatsoever and no say in their own lives. When Torvald eventually shows just how flimsy, fickle and illusory his love for her is, it’s the last straw, and finally, she acknowledges she has a duty to herself and must act. Glenister and Kelly work wonderfully together, lending necessary, believable nuance to their characters and relationship.
Our intimate, riveting journey through the fascinating, turbulent lives of these characters brings touches of fine, lively humour along the tragic way, and by the end we see there’s hope of new beginnings for some at least. Bush’s finale, though, in which Torvald addresses the piano-playing maid Anna as his “little songbird” is as creepy and chill as could be.
An exceedingly good production.
Eileen Caiger Gray