Writer and Director: Simon Stone (after Henrik Ibsen)
Simon Stone’s modern-day reinventions of classic works can be polarising – loved for their star casts, stylish dialogue, comic daring, and visual power, but criticised for their melodrama, overloaded plots and superfluity of ideas. He transmuted Lorca’s Yerma into a lifestyle blogger, Phaedra into a libidinous middle-aged politician, and Medea into an increasingly erratic biochemist. In his reimagined version of Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea, we get, in spades, everything that enthuses and annoys audiences about the writer and director’s work. It looks fantastic and boasts some outstanding performances, but there is too much happening. One yearns for Ibsen’s crisp economy.
Wealthy neurologist Edward (Andrew Lincoln) lives in a plush house somewhere in the Lake District with his second wife, Ellida (Alicia Vikander) and her two stepdaughters. Elder daughter Asa (a divinely funny Gracie Oddie-James channels a gothic Helena Bonham Carter) has a burgeoning OnlyFans career and a PhD at Yale in her sights. Younger sibling and rap fan Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike, wearing the shortest shorts imaginable) calls her dad “Ed” and has a morbid attraction towards death, embodied in her hots for the recently arrived terminally ill, rich-kid sculptor, Heath (Joe Alwyn, naïve and comically devoid of self-confidence).
Family and friends are gathering at a poolside barbecue to mark the birthday of Edward’s late first wife, Ayeesha, who gassed herself in a car in a local quarry. Joining them is Edward’s best friend, nerdy, dyslexic brain surgeon, Lyle (a Beyonce-quoting John Macmillan), who by happenstance is Ellida’s former “situationship” boyfriend. So intense is the fizzling bromance between the two high-flying, poetry-quoting doctors that one sometimes wants to shout, ‘Get a room!’.
This being Ibsen, or at least the skeletal remains of the author (this is basically a new play on old bones), past events intrude into the family’s surface calm. Ellida has a history, one which she and her husband share an unspoken agreement never to discuss. But now her former paramour, eco-activist Finn Marcet (a serendipitous anagram for ‘Frantic Men’, which broadly sums up the male characters here), has been released from a lengthy prison sentence for murder. Ellida, who is on antidepressants and seemingly occasionally hallucinates, promised to wait for the Aussie, played by Brendan Cowell. He is on his way to the Lakes to fetch her.
Confessions beckon, and secrets are revealed. Will Ellida stay with the husband who loves her, or leave with her predatory erstwhile lover and “proto Luigi Mangione” to whom she owes a promise (and it transpires, a great deal more than that)? Stone has an affection for strong female characters, so there is no guarantee she will do either. “I need to know how it would have ended,” Ellida tells us, and we get an answer of sorts. Add to the mix underexplored narrative strands concerning climate change, the challenges and inequities of age gaps in relationships, and growing up mixed race in rural England. It all makes for a heady, and frankly over-stuffed brew.
Visually, The Lady From The Sea is stunning. Lizzie Clachan’s rectangular set in the centre of the theatre is antiseptic white in the first half, then transmutes into threatening pitch-black as events tear at the sinews connecting family and friends. The sea, a symbol here for freedom, desire, the unconscious, and the past, blows in in the form of an extended rainstorm that soaks the stage (and a few in the front row) and actors alike. The rain subsequently fills a swimming pool that emerges from the floor (are there echoes of Jeremy O. Harris’s marvellous Daddy here?). Lighting and sound directors Nick Schlieper and Stefan Gregory deliver cacophonous lightning to evoke tempestuous emotional undercurrents. It is phenomenal stuff, but the graphic conceit is so enormous that it struggles to bring us emotionally close to unfolding events.
Lincoln is tremendous as the gruff, needy, overachieving Edward, though one wonders whether the character would really be so determined to retain control over such sassy, self-aware daughters. Stone sees all the women in the piece struggling, in one way or another, to escape, Hamlet-like, from the shadow of their fathers. The feminist polemic feels true to Ibsen, but it takes an age to come to fruition, the second half palls, and late-act revelations (often a bugbear with Stone) confuse rather than elucidate.
Vikander feels too undemonstrative at times; it is as if she is holding back. Perhaps that is deliberate, a foil to her quirky step-kids and overachieving husband, but the complex relationship with Edward rarely comes to life. Things get a lot steamier in the pool in some extended grappling with Cowell’s lascivious, bare-bottomed Finn. Opinions will vary about The Lady From The Sea. Have we reached peak Stone? Hopefully not, but this is not one of his best.
Runs until 8 November 2025
