The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.
The Almeida has fielded a strong cast for this updating, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, in a set by Hyemi Shin that cleverly uses the theatre’s unadorned brick walls as a contemporary design feature, along with a giant square skylight overhead like a James Turrell light sculpture. The place reeks of an empty kind of affluence — partly because the Helmers have just moved in and haven’t finished unpacking. The large fridge is unstocked, and a giant TV awaits in its cardboard box. In the centre of this expanse is what looks like detritus but is actually Reiss’s equivalent of Nora’s Christmas shopping, here an extravagance of high-end-branded bags and an outsized tree the grateful people of Norway might have sent over.
The action has clearly moved up a significant social notch, so that Torvald Helmer is no longer just a bank employee but a man in high finance who has built up his asset management company from a laptop in his kitchen and has just sold it for squillions, pending the completion of due diligence. Tom Mothersdale (pictured right) is perfect casting for this iteration of Torvald: a clever but nervy workaholic, still seemingly in love with his exuberant, sexy wife though currently on edge because of his impending ascent to the serious-moneyed class. He has also had a recent stay in hospital for a heart condition. There is something suitably weaselly about him, however, as if he is hiding a secret too.
Romola Garai’s Nora is the kind of woman who likes to be seen flaunting her assets at Ascot. When Torvald asks her what she wants for Christmas, she eventually suggests, baldly, “money”. She has lived through hard times financially but now is headily impulsive to the point of recklessness, spending wild amounts on her two children’s presents before the sale of Torvald’s company has been finalised. Reiss retains the plot point that Nora has made an unwise move to raise money for Torvald’s medical treatment, but the sum she has purloined is eye-watering here, and its source highly illegal. Unlike Ibsen’s heroine, this Nora is nowhere close to paying off her debt; in fact, that figure has risen dramatically and she’s merely paying off the interest.
Ibsen’s secondary characters are all there — Petter Rank (Olivier Hubard), the dying doctor who’s in love with Nora; Kristine Linde (Thalissa Teixeira), her old friend, now a destitute widow despite marrying for money to support her unhealthy mother and brother; Nils Krogstad (James Corrigan, pictured below, left with Romola Garai), Torvald’s co-worker, who helped Nora embezzle the money. But they now inhabit a shiny world of conspicuous consumption, where lines of coke fuel big decisions and everything is available, people's privacy included, on Instagram.
In this more materialistic milieu, everything coarsens, the characters’ language especially; the F-word seems to appear in every sentence, and Nora is very liberal with the C-word (albeit referring to herself that way). Inhibitions have gone too: Nora is openly physically affectionate with Dr Rank in front of her husband; and Torvald has become a creature with easily excitable sexual desires that he tries to satisfy with Nora on the floor among the presents. Krogstad is still a menacing presence, but more like a character from a thriller; only Mrs Lind retains some kind of dignity, playing the apparently well-meaning whistleblower about Nora’s criminality, as she does in the original, and insisting the strong should help the weak. But there is something sad about her investigating her former university mates via their “socials".
Inevitably, Nora is the character in whom Reiss’s modernising is most noticeable. She is giddy and sensual, secretly pleased Torvald wants her to wear a “nurse’s uniform” to the neighbours’ fancy-dress party, a tarty, shiny number that is basically a mini-dress maid’s outfit that exposes her long high-heeled legs. Her pre-party dance for him, to Megan Boni’s Man From Finance, is all bump-and-grind, making you wonder whether physical pleasure is the root of the couple’s attraction to each other, not anything emotional, let alone spiritual. At one point they dance in a troilistic tangle with Dr Ruck, as if this is part of their sexual repertoire. Are all their connections actually transactIonal, and performative rather than real, as they ultimately come to believe?
Hubard's Dr Ruck (pictured right, with Romola Garai) is a welcome mellower presence, the only “thinker” among them, identifying two kinds of people in the world, life-enhancers or leeches. His dry wit provides some flashes of humour here, but the aridity of this emotional wasteland begins to grate. It’s as if Reiss has decided: forget Nora the woman striking out for a queasy kind of freedom, whose abandonment of her family life has typically been seen as a shattering event. This Nora's "freedom" is to behave exactly as she likes, as if there are no consequences. Meanwhle, Torvald has become a man who defines a “moral quandary” in terms of whether it’s okay to have sex with his alluring wife when she’s dead-drunk.
Garai does her best, in a highly charged, committed performance, to convince us Nora has seen the light and must quit her old unaffordable ways and start being “real”. But it feels like too much of a handbrake turn. She seems so besotted with her newly comfortable circumstances, and confident she can seduce Dr Rank into helping her keep them, that her change of heart seems to come out of nowhere.
Reiss pulls off a good twist involving the US bombardment of Syria, to give the piece a tangible topicality. But what emerges is a sort of tragicomedy of manners that many of today’s narratives still seem preoccupied with, 40 years after the Big Bang, notably TV’s Succession, Billions and Industry. At least in a long-running TV series the characters have time to display unexpected traits and hidden depths. This two-hour sprint through the emotional bankruptcy of its lead characters left me unmoved and despondent: is this really all there is to say about wealthy people, that wanting money is intrinsically bad, and the people who pursue it are monsters? That may be true, but it’s not interesting.
A Doll’s House at the Almeida Theatre until 23 May
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