Last night I was grateful for the opportunity to visit the Crucible for the opening night of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House, directed by Elin Schofield and starring Siena Kelly as despairing middle-class housewife Nora Helmer. Nora struggles to keep her household afloat in a society where she can count her individual rights on one hand, and a home where, to her husband, she is no more than ‘my little songbird.’
This production is a new adaptation by Chris Bush, whose most recent Sheffield credits are on the Olivier award-winning show Standing At The Sky’s Edge. I wasn’t sure coming into this exactly what route Bush’s adaptation would take, and I had harboured a few doubts that it might have fallen victim to the 21st century trend of changing a play’s setting or period to refresh it for a modern audience. I say ‘victim,’ because I think this very hard to get right.
Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the the walls of the eponymous house rise to reveal an interior with decor fitting of Ibsen’s period, which then swiftly came to life with actors costumed to match. Bush didn’t plunge us into the 21st century by having Nora and Christina (Eleanor Sutton) reconnect via Facebook, nor did she set Ibsen’s text in a famous historical warzone. No, instead she focused primarily on the language of the text when adapting A Doll’s House for a modern audience.
I read this play for the first time just over a year ago and fell in love, although – and this is coming from a student of English Literature – I’m not afraid to admit that the text’s antiquity did make its message a bit harder to puzzle out. Bush’s adaptation prolongs the life of Ibsen’s classic by bringing the language its characters use up to speed with how we understand communication today, without disturbing the spirit of the original.
In fact, Bush can perhaps explain it better herself. In an interview with Sheffield Theatres, she said: ‘We decided early on we weren’t interested in doing a contemporary “take” on the text. […] Instead, I’ve just tried to make something clean and emotionally truthful, scrubbing away any extraneous 19th century waffle that stops us understanding who these people are.’
As a young theatre-goer who doesn’t see a lot of people my age attending shows, I really appreciated how Bush didn’t just rejuvenate A Doll’s House, but did the work of demystifying it for her audience too, so they can sit back and experience true art as it should be experienced. But of course, a play isn’t a singular effort. It’s the actors who breathed life into this classic, helping Bush to achieve her vision for the play.
Siena Kelly’s Nora was stunning. I was floored by her emotional range, especially in the much darker second half. The delivery of certain lines was so raw that a collective gasp could be heard in the auditorium, and her quiet moments were equally powerful. Special commendation must also be given to Tom Glenister, because it takes a great actor to make you truly hate a character as much as I hated his Torvald, so blinded by patriarchy that he cannot see how it has harmed him too.
There were a few opening night slips with dialogue in the first act which I’m sure will be ironed out over the production’s run, and nor were they noticeable enough to diminish the play’s overall effect. The second act was truly remarkable and saw the entire cast now joining Kelly in showcasing their range, as the play’s pace quickened and the suspense built in the first half came to a thundering climax.
Under Schofield’s direction, the use of scenery and props was minimalist, allowing for no distraction from the power of Ibsen’s message. Lighting was also simple, but shadows were employed to great effect in externalising Nora’s internal strife for the audience, before she eventually speaks of it herself, only when its burden becomes crushing.
In this sense, the play’s technical production is a microcosm of what the entire work, performed countless times over the past 145 years aims to achieve: to externalise women’s domestic struggles that for millennia before had been the topic of only internal discussion, if any discussion at all. In the Crucible last night, the suffocating dynamic between Nora and Torvald was laid bare for us all to see. Bush’s adaptation, Schofield’s direction and Kelly’s stellar performance combined are just what this play needs to keep it going for centuries more. Ibsen would be proud.
Rating: ★★★★★
A Doll’s House is playing at the Crucible until October 12th
