A Doll\’s House (Bath & Kingston)

If you’re going to have a season exploring women’s place in society, as Peter Hall outlines in the programme to his 2008 Bath season, then you certainly can’t do it without Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The iconic work in modern drama, a few of us have seen one or two by now. One thinks of Janet McTeer and Cheryl Campbell, definitive Noras breaking loose from marital fetters, child-women emerging into a harsher self-realisation. Last year, veteran American avant-gardist Lee Breuer also shocked a few in Edinburgh with his radical reworking, Dollhouse, a version in which Nora’s journey became a visual metaphor for sexual politics played out visually within a doll’s house of tiny doors and looming giant puppets – a veritable Grimm’s tale.

No such iconoclastic license has been taken by Hall in his new production (translation by Stephen Mulrine) although Simon Higlett’s opening façade – a handsome townhouse frontage which quickly becomes transparent – does suggest an overgrown doll’s house.
Thereafter, however, Hall’s production produces no superficial fireworks but works away faithfully at exposing the charade beneath the happy family veneer of Nora (Catherine McCormack) and Torvald (Finbar Lynch).

Mulrine’s supple adaptation and Hall’s direction extracts a wonderful naturalism. There is a sense of a long-lived-in past between the two of them and Lynch is particularly good at suggesting the smug self-satisfaction of the lawyer husband, a product of his time, for whom marriage and wife is all about possession and unblinking moral certitude.
As Nora, McCormack – as well known for her films as stage work and who also plays the lead role in Hall’s Bath companion piece, The Portrait of a Lady – signposts her frenzy all too easily. Hands fluttering like semaphore flags, she almost gives the game away as if this infantilised wife-mother already knows the game is up, exposure imminent. Hall also underlines our collusion in her story by having Nora and Susie Trayling’s excellent Mrs Linde speaking their lines directly to us.

At the end, however, McCormack brings Nora’s journey to a riveting climax with a self-realisation that expresses only too clearly the terrible gulf, as Ibsen himself put it, between `two kinds of moral laws…one for men and one, quite different, for women’. McCormack lets us see that in slamming the door on motherly and marital duties, this flirtatious, seductive ingénue is taking the first step to understanding that reality but also taking responsibility for herself.

It is finely done, as is Anthony Howell’s Nils Krogstad and Christopher Ravenscroft’s ghoulish, white-faced Dr Rank. A play still about economic determinants and the bargains we make, it is a pertinent warning, even after all these years.

-Carole Woddis