Perhaps the best thing to do with a play that is approaching its 150th birthday and still earning a place on contemporary stages is simply to get out of the way. Unless you have a Jamie Lloyd-style take and Jessica Chastain on speed dial, there probably isn’t a good enough reason to add bells and whistles to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Just do the play and trust there’s a reason it has lasted a century and a half – that appears to be the unifying principle behind this production, which opens the Crucible’s autumn season. Sheffield favourite Chris Bush, fresh from the success of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, is the adapter here, with Elin Schofield in the director’s chair.
Both Bush and Schofield appear happy to play second fiddle to Ibsen, with Bush admitting that when it came to the script, “the more I got under its skin, the less I needed to change”. Schofield, too, seems content to allow Ibsen’s story to be king; there are few directorial flourishes. Indeed, at times the action feels quite static on the epic Crucible stage, the script doing the lion’s share of the work.
“Songbird” Nora is the prototype for unfulfilled wives in modern drama, a woman who subsumes her intellect, her very personage, beneath the role of model wife and whose apparent greatest vice is a sweet tooth satiated by macarons. Siena Kelly as Nora is a picture of desperate restraint in the face of the slightly miscast Tom Glenister, too fresh-faced to be playing Nora’s world-weary husband, Torvald.
Kelly’s performance aside, the biggest influence on the production comes from Chiara Stephenson’s impressive design, with the walls of the apparently happy family home made occasionally opaque under Richard Howell’s lighting design. When the walls rise and we see the inside of the house where secrets lie, ready to ambush the inhabitants, Nora’s downfall, rise and liberation become as compelling as they are inexorable. The final flourish, when she finally reclaims herself from her father’s and then her husband’s benevolent tyranny, is deeply moving.
