In 1879, Henrik Ibsen first staged A Doll's House. The play was a social provocation, and the breakdown of Nora and Torvald’s marriage was widely seen as an attack on patriarchy and a challenge to the roles imposed on women in marriage and society. It shocked audiences and provoked moral outrage across the ideological spectrum. In Anya Reiss’s twenty-first-century adaptation, however, the concerns are markedly different. Both partners are recast as mean-spirited, materialistic narcissists, and the collapse of their marriage stems less from structural injustice than from their own shallow values. It is more likely to leave audiences despairing at the state of the contemporary world that has produced such self-absorbed individuals. The tentative hopefulness present in Ibsen’s original, the sense that society might be reshaped for the better, is entirely absent. Instead Reiss offers a bleak, almost fatalistic vision, and her reworking of Ibsen’s characters and plot carries a tone of bitter irony. These morally and emotionally stunted figures are drug-addled and self-indulgent to such a degree that love is reduced to little more than mutual dependency, while ideas of duty and honour have all but vanished. Kristine, the sole character who appears to act from more principled motives, has sacrificed herself to support a dying father and a disabled brother by marrying for money. Now destitute, she is left without a viable path forward and she admits that she would not make the same choice again. It remains unclear whether the sacrifice refers to marrying for money or to supporting her family. This harsh reimagining is carried through in the performances. Tom Mothersdale’s Torvald oozes a sleek, predatory charm with his venture capitalist’s polish barely concealing a streak of moral vacancy. Opposite him, Romola Garai delivers a strikingly frayed Nora, all jangling nerves and brittle affect, her vulnerability flickering uneasily between manipulation and genuine distress. In the end, this production strips Ibsen’s drama of its emancipatory spark and replaces it with something colder and more unsettling. Where the original invites the possibility of awakening, Reiss leaves us with a portrait of emotional bankruptcy, and a lingering question as to whether any meaningful change is still within reach.
Rated: ★★★
Reviewed by J.C.
Photo by Marc Brenner
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