Writer: Henrik Ibsen
Adaptor: Anya Reiss
Director: Joe Hill-Gibbons
Most of us know how A Doll’s House ends, and so it’s intriguing, when Hyemi Shin’s set is revealed, that it’s unlikely that the single door on stage could be slammed by anyone, least of all Nora. And in an adaptation that is squarely set in the present world of investment bankers, WhatsApp and Insta, perhaps a slamming door doesn’t quite cut it. We are a long way from Ibsen’s 1879.
While the Norwegian names are retained, the characters now reside in London, in a fancy apartment that Torvald has just rented on the expectation that in a few days’ time, once he’s sold his company, he will be very rich. Anticipating this money, Nora has been shopping. Bags from Liberty, Selfridges, Lego and Waitrose are piled up on the floor of their basement. A large Christmas tree, still in its wrapper, lies prostrate alongside them. Nonetheless, the room still appears empty, like a metaphor for their comfortable but unfilled lives.
Torvald despairs of his wife’s spendthrift ways, but she has bigger debts than those on her Amex card. Sticking firmly to the original plot, Nora discloses her story of fraud and blackmail to Kristine, an old friend she barely remembers from university, who has turned up unexpectedly in the hope of a job.
Straightaway, Thalissa Teixeira’s Kristine is a more likeable character than Romola Garai’s flighty, privileged Nora. With a backstory of selflessness, Kristine’s decision to marry for money rather than love appears a sensible one. But when it comes to Nora, her decision to defraud the system rather than a rich husband appears less honourable, even when we discover that Nora’s motives were self-sacrificing, too.
Tom Mothersdale’s Torvald is less stiff than how he’s normally represented: less condescending, less controlling. For the first two acts, he seems like a decent man, not your average city boy. He doesn’t really react to his wife’s endless flirting with another university friend, the pompous doctor Petter (Oliver Huband), who is waiting for bad news about his health. Torvald watches on, blinded to his cuckolding.
However, Anya Reiss’s smart and sweary update under Joe Hill-Gibbins’s steady hand is less concerned with women’s rights and agency and more an interrogation of the subject of money and how its pursuit makes us rotten to the core. This analysis is made clear in the short third act when we see how Torvald is just as trapped as Nora: the yet-to-be-slammed door could be an escape from their already-written lives for either of them.
And yet, the alternative, ambiguous end feels like a cop-out. In the original, it’s clear that Nora loves her children, but here Garai’s relationship with her kids is more complicated. We never see her with them; she talks excitedly to them on the phone and coos when she hears their voices on the baby monitor. But at the same time, she tells Petter that she never really plays with them and seems more interested in lavishing gifts upon them rather than spending time with them. She, like her husband, is stuck in a role that society requires.
Runs until 23 May 2026
