A DOLL'S HOUSE To 18 July.
London.
A DOLL’S HOUSE
by Henrik Ibsen new version by Zinnie Harris.
Donmar Warehouse 41 Earlham Street London WC2H 9LX To 18 July 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 4 July 4 2.30pm.
BSL Signed 29 June.
Captioned 15 June.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Tickets: 0870 060 6624.
www.donmarwarehouse.com
Review: Carole Woddis 20 May.
Topical, as it happens, rather than revolutionary.
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House should have the capacity to still rattle the cage. Recent productions seen in London, from Berlin’s Schaubuhne (2004) to Thea Shurrock’s (2003) at the small-scale Southwark Playhouse, have taken decidedly different routes, as did Lee Breuer’s radical reworking, dollhouse, at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival. Peter Hall’s Bath production last year held to a fairly straight line but one still came away shuddering. The strange thing about the Donmar’s current, all-star production is that it fails to shock more.
Newcomer director Kfir Yefet brings a refreshingly light touch to proceedings, whilst choosing to place the onus as much upon the men in the piece as women. Normally, it is Nora’s play but here the honours are pretty even. There are many fine moments leading up to the climax of Nora turning her back on hearth and home. But curiously that’s precisely where this production falters.
It’s all over far too quickly. Hall’s production, in Stephen Mulrine’s excellent translation, had the inestimable value of making us aware of the terrible gulf, as Ibsen put it, between “two kinds of moral laws…one for men and one, quite different, for women” and of Nora’s realisation of her higher responsibility to herself.
But here the usually fine Zinnie Harris truncates Nora’s awakening. It comes on us far too suddenly. Though her transplantation of the action forward to Edwardian London and change of Torvald the banker to Thomas the politician, newly promoted to the Cabinet, underscores hypocrisy and produces some deliciously topical lines (even Harris could not have foreseen when she wrote them the effect they have following the week we’ve just experienced in British politics), the overall impact is dulled.
Anderson makes an unusually fragile Nora to Toby Stephens’ forceful, verbally abusive Thomas. Hard to believe this man suffered the breakdown from which his wife saved him with a loan that starts the whole sorry saga.
There is also fine work from Tara Fitzgerald as an uncommonly strong Christine and Christopher Eccleston’s catalystic rough diamond and fallen politician, Neil Kelman. This is not a production, however, to frighten any horses.
Nora: Gillian Anderson.
Thomas: Toby Stephens.
Annie: Maggie Wells.
Christine Lyle: Tara Fitzgerald.
Neil Kelman: Christopher Eccleston.
Dr Rank: Anton Lesser.
Director: Kfir Yefet.
Designer: Anthony Ward.
Lighting: Hugh Vanstone.
Sound/Composer: Tim Phillips.
Choreographer: Aletta Collins.
2009-05-24 00:31:18