Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a panic attack in textual form, that smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking.
Nora (Romola Garai) is an anxious, impulsive woman, who we first meet in her bougie rental house surrounded by obscene amounts of Christmas shopping. Her workaholic husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is taken aback by the sprawl of purchases, but Garai’s Nora remains brittly giddy, reminding him of how different this is to their last Christmas: they are on the cusp of being rich, with the last stages of the multimillion-pound sale of his company going through.
It is, however, all built on a lie, albeit a lie Nora has very nearly gotten away with. Desperate after Torvald’s drug addiction almost ruined them, she laid her hands on a vast sum of money to pay for him to go to a fancy rehab centre. He believes – or chooses to believe – that it was paid for by an improbable inheritance from Nora’s late father. In fact, she acquired it by illicit means that finally come out when Torvald lets go of his longterm employee Nils (James Corrigan), who tells Nora that her secret is dependent on his being reinstated.
Reiss’s updates are an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties
Reiss is a former Royal Court prodigy who made a big splash in her late teens and early twenties before mostly drifting off into TV. Although Jamie Lloyd picked up her 2012 adaptation of The Seagull a few years ago – which she updated for the West End run – this is her first stage play in almost a decade. And it’s really good! The best thing she’s done in theatre, I’d say. Structurally, it’s a fairly faithful update of Ibsen’s original. But at the points where it needs to be updated – the original plot revolves around the illegality of women taking out bank loans – Reiss’s updates aren’t just a modish reskinning but an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties.
At its core is our relationship to money, debt and value. Torvald is a potential multimillionaire, but if the sale doesn’t go through, he’s basically blown it. Nora’s wild borrowings and attempt to game the system could destroy them, but could also make them. Everything is a terrifying gamble, a throw of the dice that ends with ruin or vindication; nobody is safe; the people content to live ‘normal’ lives – Nils, Nora’s old pal Kristine (Thalissa Teixeira), the couple’s confused doctor friend Peter (Oliver Huband) - are buffeted and trampled by Torvald and Nora’s high-stakes scheming. Probably not many of us have found ourselves in this exact situation – but Reiss’s text speaks deftly to a world of precarious Klarna payments, unwise overdrafts and reckless payday spending.
That’s not all she adds, either. The fact that the anxious Nora would rather buy her five-year-old a ludicrous number of Lego sets than actually hang out with him speaks deftly to the idea of money as a stand-in for human warmth and interaction. Later, when the couple go to a Christmas Eve party, the usually work-addicted Torvald repeatedly tells Nora to ‘remember we’ve got the kids tomorrow’, as if that was somehow unusual for a married couple with children on Christmas Day.
Garai is tremendous. She’s known for playing fierce, charismatic women, but her Nora is something like a masterclass in the opposite, a woman so scared of the world that she has consciously reframed her role and limited her horizons to the solitary purpose of pleasing and enabling Torvald, retreating nervously behind his wealth, skittish and awkward in conversation. And it is blindingly obvious that no matter the outcome to all this, she will never be happy – she doesn’t even seem capable of happiness. Garai marinates every line delivery, every gesture in compelling neuroticism: it’s entirely gripping, the 90-minute first half flying by.
The last time Hill-Gibbins directed Garai, it was in a Young Vic Measure for Measure that played out on a heap of actual sex dolls. Although there is some weird, unsettling business with Nora and a skimpy nurse’s outfit, the director has reined it in these days. The most striking piece of staging in Hyemi Shin’s set is the lake of presents, and their ominous, slow clearing away. The director keeps things fairly naturalist, but always nervy: there is a great scene where Kristine watches TV on a gargantuan flatscreen that leans precariously against a pillar - it hasn’t been mounted and probably never will be. Everything is temporary, rootless.
The brilliance of Garai’s Nora and her interactions with Motherdale’s cult leader-ish Torvald – who is clearly in unhealthy denial about his addictions – stands in contrast to some of the smaller characters who sit more awkwardly in Reiss’s adaptation. Peter is a difficult character to make sense of, in large part because the story calls for him to be dying of cancer, which is a weird additional angle to have to crowbar in.
There is also a distracting final plot twist concerning the purchase of Torvald’s company that feels like a slightly crass critique of capitalism, rather than a thing that actually makes any sense.
But on the whole, this is superb, daringly avoiding the temptation to frame Nora as a simple troubled heroine, reframing the timeless story in vividly unsettling modern colours – a feverish parable for our age of anxiety.
