A Doll's House

Featuring Romola Garai’s much-anticipated return to the stage, Anya Reiss’ ultra-modern take on A Doll’s House (directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins) aims to be as groundbreaking in its own way as the original.

When Henrik Ibsen’s play first came out in 1879, it was a controversial success that quickly sold out. The Norwegian didn’t so much analyse the cosy Victorian-era idea of the family unit but detonated it skyhigh. When his heroine Nora famously slams the door closed behind her as the curtain falls, Ibsen posed uncomfortable questions about the traditional perceptions of a woman’s relationship with her husband, family and home.

This is a role Garai was seemingly born to take on, especially given her recent efforts. In Mark Rosenblatt’s 2024 play Giant, she plays a feisty Jewish-American sales exec trying to get novelist Roald Dahl (John Lithgow) to repent his anti-semite views. Meanwhile, her refreshingly raw part in Eline Arbo’s stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir The Years famously led to multiple fainting episodes - usually men - during the bloody abortion scene. Her brilliance in both roles led to her being nominated twice in the same category at the Oliviers (she eventually won for the latter work).

Reiss keeps the skeleton of Ibsen's plot intact but builds a very modern body around it. Nora and Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) are living in a palatial but sparsely furnished rental house in North London. They are on the cusp of becoming multimillionaires, awaiting the final stages of a massive company sale.Torvald is portrayed not as a bank manager, but as the workaholic, recovering-addict CEO of a financial start-up. Nora is his "trophy wife" who masks a deep, jittery anxiety, a strict diet, performative shopping from Selfridges and a "sexy nurse" outfit for special occasions.

The central lie is given a refresh: instead of a generic illness, Torvald suffered a cocaine-induced heart attack that nearly ruined them. Nora secretly "bankrolled" his recovery at an elite rehab centre, not with an inheritance, but by embezzling money from one of her husband’s client. Nils Krogstad — an employee and old friend of Torvald who has just been fired — helped Nora and now threatens to reveal her deception unless she gets him reinstated. Both know the theft would kill the company sale and ruin the couple’s social standing.

Added to the mix are Kristine (no longer a widow but now a divorced university friend of Nora) played by Thalissa Teixeira and Olivier Huband’s Petter, here a hedonist doctor with a secret. The former is used to reflect on a capitalistic attitude to relationships: Kristine married for money, not love, and now finds herself with neither. Petter, on the other hand, is obsessed with Nora who sees his attraction to her as one way to dig herself out of her situation. Reiss does well to flesh out these minor characters and the lively Huband in particular appears to be having a ball.

When the truth inevitably comes out, Torvald’s reaction is purely selfish. He doesn't see a woman who saved his life; he sees a liability who has "blown" his big payout. Even when the legal threat is neutralised, the damage to their "brand" is all he can focus on. It’s an explosive moment that is defused not by Krogstad’s remorseful final act but by a very timely piece of news about the United States bombing an oil-rich country in the Middle East during a Christian holiday (plus ça change…). It’s a preposterous deus ex machina that gets Torvald off the hook — even if Nora is still criminally culpable — and wins points for up-to-the-minute relevance but its implausibility totally deflates the momentum built up so brilliantly by Garai and Mothersdale, From there on in, it is all downhill.

When Ibsen’s Nora finds out just what a total piece of shit her husband is – a husband she has risked everything for — she reacts in the most emotionally violent way possible by ditching her wedding ring and the life she shared with him. Reiss instead neuters this crucial moment: after Nora’s thoughts of suicide are cruelly turned against her by Torvald (he tells her that she would be doing him a favour), she remains a paralysed figure on the floor unable to decide whether to abandon a wealthy life and her child that she can hear over a baby monitor or somehow live within this hollow marriage.

The most controversial aspect of this play when it first came out - the very idea that a woman would voluntarily leave a marriage and family for any reason – here feels not so much iconoclastic as utterly plastic.

A Doll's House continues at Almeida Theatre until 23 May.


Photo credit: Marc Brenner