Last week The Director and I won a pair of theatre tickets
in a raffle. The play was Ibsen’s A Dolls’ House at the Young Vic, so this
evening we roped in one of our wonderful friends to babysit and went along. I’m
glad that we didn’t have to pay for the tickets.
A full house on a wet Monday evening is certainly something
to be proud of, and certainly the play has had glowing reviews from the
Guardian and has had to extend its run to meet demand. I can see why it’s been
such a success: what the audience is given is a shallow, easily digestible
slice of jaded propaganda.
The direction,
courtesy of Carrie Cracknell is patchy- Hattie Morahan works incredibly hard as
Nora, but the rest of the casts’ performances are so painfully restrained that
she has little to work with. The blame must be shared by the director and
playwright who between them seem to have conspired to produce a play in which
only the protagonist is allowed to show any depth of character. I felt
particularly sorry for Dominic Rowan as Torvald, who showed momentarily in the
second act what he might have been capable of, had he been allowed to fill out
his part. The character of Christine was wasted: so much more could have been
made of her role, but she felt like nothing more than a handy deus ex machina. The “sexual tension”
between Nora and Dr Rank feels formulaic and superfluous. The combination of
acts one and two results in an interminable first half, by the end of which
even an enthusiastic audience were starting to fidget and one gentleman behind
me was audibly asleep. There were
numerous small errors- things getting stuck, lines getting lost in laughter or
too-loud music which, while not terminal were irritating.
When Ibsen’s play had its debut, it must have been
groundbreaking; the story of a young wife dealing with the repercussions of
borrowing money and deceiving her husband comes to a dramatic close when the
protagonist, Nora, opts to leave her husband and three young children to set
off alone on the path towards self actualisation. At least, I think that’s the
way the director saw it, and judging from the jubilant reaction of the audience
it’s how quite a large proportion of them saw it too. I had, shall we say, a
less sympathetic interpretation. Carrie Cracknell’s presentation of Simon
Stephens’ appallingly awkward script was an irresponsible, immature treatment
of a story which could have posed fantastically complex questions about love,
honesty and self awareness. Cracknell takes a character who, through her own
cupidity gets herself tangled up in a mess of debt and deception and portrays
her as a devoted wife taking assertive action. She twists her attempts to pass
the blame and run away from the repercussions into a defiant act of feminist
self determination. Perhaps when Ibsen first wrote the play this kind of
presentation could have been excused, but now, when we are dealing with soaring
divorce rates and crippling debt through vast swathes of society, it felt lazy
and clichéd. A tired, guardian-stroking feminist middle-finger salute to an
obsolete image of “the patriarchy” which simply doesn’t feel relevant to a
modern woman of Cracknell’s generation, at least, not to this one.
Henrick Ibsen in “The
Enemy of The People” writes, “The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our
society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority”. I
think he would have been rather disappointed that his work has been given such
an unimaginative outing.
