Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) ends with a slammed door; A Doll’s House, Part 2 (2017) begins with a knock on the same door. American playwright Lucas Hnath’s continuation imagines Nora, the woman famous for not wanting to be a wife, coming back, 15 years after leaving her husband and children; it asks what she has been up to – and what she might do next.
As Nora, Noma Dumezweni is imposing though sometimes over-deliberate in speech, with phrases clinging together like snowballs. She arrives upholstered in a heavy 1879-style dress not designed to help anyone scythe through the world. She could blend into the furniture of a turn-of-the-century drawing room, but Rae Smith’s design is purposefully bare.
