A Doll’s House at the Almeida Theatre – review

Dear old Ibsen. He is given a modern makeover more than any other 19^th-century playwright, perhaps because his themes seem so relevant to our troubled, 21^st-century times.

It’s impossible to know what he would make of Anya Reiss’ thorough-going “reimagining” of his 1879 masterpiece about Nora Helmer, a woman treated like a doll who needs to do a huge amount of growing up. But the adaptation, though radical, is both scintillating and intelligent, and gives Romola Garai a glorious opportunity to show once more just what a subtle and fascinating actress she is.

This version places Nora firmly in an age of investment bankers, hedge funds, smart phones and Instagram and adds a new emphasis on the corrupting effects of capitalism, how it is money and the lust for comfort and wealth that ultimately warps the morality both of society and the home.

When we first see Garai’s charming but needy and tactless Nora, she is surrounded by upmarket shopping bags, having maxxed out the credit card to provide the perfect Christmas for her children in their new, hyper-trendy flat with a white carpet and exposed brick walls (design by Hyemi Shin). Her husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is anxious: the deal that is going to bring his investment bank millions has yet to be signed. Should she really be spending like that?

Of course, as the plot unfolds, an overloaded Amex is the least of Nora’s problems. She’s got herself into a terrible financial mess when, in order to finance rehab for Torvald, after a cocaine-induced heart attack, she stole money from one of his client’s accounts, with the help of Nils Krogstad (James Corrigan, wonderfully seedy and anxious), who works for Torvald. When he is sacked, he threatens to stop covering her tracks and tell Torvald all.

Garai perfectly captures both Nora’s increasing hysteria and her lack of understanding of the realities of the position she finds herself in. Tactless and self-obsessed, she begs Torvald to reinstate Nils, puts on a sexy waitress outfit to dance for him, tries to seduce their dying doctor friend for money, then thinks the better of it when he declares his love.

She’s needy and narcissistic, but also constantly emphasises that she stole the money because she loved her husband. “I saved his life,” she says to her long-lost friend Kristine. But when Kristine, played with gentle authority by Thalissa Teixeira, advises her to come clean, she is too scared and child-like to confess.

Reiss’s writing is smart and sweary, entirely convincing in its depiction of Nora as a spoilt “yummy mummy”, who requires others to provide validation for her actions. She’s also altered Nora’s relationship with her children, who are never seen. She loves them, yet their dependence upon her feels like another bar in the cage that traps her.

She has banked everything on luxurious domesticity, and so in Joe Hill-Gibbins’ propulsive direction, the final confrontation between her and Torvald, when his sexual obsessiveness and proprietary attitudes suddenly turn to accusation and loathing, is utterly gripping.

Mothersdale, previously just smug, annoying and work-driven, strips away a mask to reveal the contempt and entitlement beneath. His amorality and possessiveness are terrifying; it is no wonder Nora is suddenly shocked to her senses, to the realisation that the life she is living is hollow.

Controversially, Reiss veers away from Ibsen’s famous ending. It’s interesting, but it is also a rare false note in a clever and absorbing rethinking.