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Who would Henrik Ibsen’s Nora be in 21st-century Britain? Would her husband, Torvald still be a bank manager and she his “little squirrel” housewife?
Transposing this drama of 19th-century proto-feminism into the present day is a tricky business, partly because the gendered confinements of Nora and Torvald’s “ideal” middle-class marriage are built on thoroughly old-fashioned values: a husband who prides himself as the sole breadwinner, a wife who would spark social scandal if she left her marital home. Adapter Anya Reiss does a heroic job of reimagining this story for modern times, and half pulls it off.
In her version, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, Nora (Romola Garai) is the wife of high-earning London banker, Torvald (Tom Mothersdale), who is also a recovering drug addict. Nora, you sense, is something of a “trophy wife” for him, although far cleverer and more resourceful than he realises. She has secretly bailed the household out of financial ruin and found the money to pay for Torvald’s addiction recovery. They are living an upwardly mobile life – a scatter of white goods and a sprawl of shopping bags on Hyemi Shin’s stage set represent Nora’s pre-Christmas shopping splurge. It is conspicuous consumption built on her lie and his convenient blindness to it.
The original drama’s plot cogs are all here: the blackmail that Nora contends with through Torvald’s colleague, Nils Krogstad (James Corrigan), and a visit from her old, needy friend Kristine (Thalissa Teixeira), a penniless woman whose decision to marry for money has backfired, and who initially regards Nora as a spoilt wife, judging from the carefully manicured surface of her life.
It is a convincingly updated scenario, with talk of Instagram, money and a stock market rocked by conflict in the Middle East. So the sexual dynamics of Nora and Torvald’s marriage are examined through the crosshairs of class and contemporary capitalism. As an adaptation, it is inspired in its ideas, full of intersectional ambition, although weighed down by it too, with a strange tension between sending up this unpleasant, money-obsessed banker class and eliciting our sympathies for Nora. Her dream of feminist self-realisation gets slightly lost in the mix.
There is some excellent acting from the accomplished cast to smooth over the stiffer bits – so much so that you can see the effort and art of it. The roles feel performed by them and maybe this is the point – the performance of marital roles, the concealment of true selves – but it brings awkwardness. It is most felt through Garai’s performance as a woman who relates to her husband – and also her dying friend Petter (played by Olivier Huband, and whose character seems rather a spare part) – through sexual frisson and flirtation. She puts on a sexy nurse’s outfit and dances suggestively for them both.
Her body is ostensibly her currency, but Garai’s Nora seems like too intelligent a woman for this, even if you understand that this is a strategy for Nora, who has learned to please men this way. The role she plays as a mother is just as much a performance, she states later on, which feels like an interesting, almost illicit admission, but it comes briefly out of the blue and disappears as quickly. We only ever hear the couple’s children on baby monitors or phone calls rather than see them, as in the original, so this idea can’t be further explored.
The drama gathers intensity in the closing confrontation between Nora and Torvald about the conditionality of their love, perhaps built on material acquisition. “Is love meant to be subject to the market?” Nora says. But it seems like a summary of Reiss’s preoccupations, somewhat.
Still, there is innovation here and Reiss suggests that a more complicated version of Ibsen’s dream of female autonomy is needed for our age than a simple, shutting door. You can – just about – imagine a future in which Nora and Torvald agree to go to couples therapy to hash it all out. Modern indeed.
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At the Almeida theatre, London, until 23 May
