‘The Lady from the Sea’ review

The Norwegians have come to Notting Hill to show us how their most famous writer, Henrik Ibsen, should be done, in this bilingual staging of ‘The Lady from the Sea’. A co-production between the Norwegian Ibsen Company and The Print Room, it strips away the sort of starchy period hand-wringing that can plague second-rate Ibsen revivals.

Loosely inspired by folktale, the play finds the sea-loving Ellida washed up in a town in the mountains of west Norway, unhappily married to Wangel, a doctor, and resented by her two stepdaughters, Bolette and Hilde. The arrival of Arnholm, Bolette’s ex-teacher, stirs things up, while sickly, wannabe artist Lyngstrand nervously hangs around, as beige as his corduroys.

Director Marit Moum Aune’s staging is strikingly light on its feet: funny, human and sad. For the most part, she successfully dislodges the characters from the pedestal of heavy symbolism. She prods the sinews of their conversations to make them living people, underplaying high drama in favour of an awkward social dance that’s full of deflected glances and trailing sentences. This is a group of people trapped by their choices and by each other.

The script’s fluid flip between surtitled Norwegian and Mari Vatne Kjeldstadli’s English translation brings its own dramatic voice. Depending on who’s speaking, the switch between the two captures both distance and intimacy as characters pace around the bleak sweep of designer Erlend Birkeland’s stark, sand-covered set, parched and featureless apart from a pointedly placed fish tank.        

If the sea represents liberation, its depths are murky here. As Ellida, Pia Tjelta returns to Ibsen at the Print Room after last year’s ‘Little Eyolf’. She’s a tremendous stage presence as a woman still reeling from the death of her baby son three years earlier. Her obsession with a man from her past, and with the ocean, only takes full flight after she’s been medicated to the eyeballs by her controlling, fearful, cognac-swigging husband (Adrian Rawlins).

This isn’t mythologised tragedy. Metaphor plays second fiddle to a nuanced portrait of just how family members can hurt each other. Molly Windsor gives us enough of a glimpse of the aching vulnerability beneath Hilde’s spiteful bravado to make it sting. As Bolette, desperate for education and travel, Marina Bye feels closest to us on stage, registering the double standards of Edward Ashley’s haplessly stupid Lyngstrand or Kåre Conradi’s lovelorn Arnholm.

It’s all rooted in such an effective, pained sense of reality, it’s actually pretty jarring when Ellida’s former lover plods down the steps of the auditorium with almost parodic ominousness. Everyone else is so well fleshed out, he feels out of place. But this ultimately doesn’t derail a powerfully complex production that scrapes away many of the barnacles of cliché and lets us see Ibsen properly.