Stef Smith’s Nora: A Doll’s House, a response to Ibsen’s classic, had its nicely timed opening at Manchester’s Royal Exchange on International Women’s Day. Ibsen used to deny he had intended to write a feminist play but nothing trumps A Doll’s House (1879) in its scrutiny of a woman trapped within an oppressive marriage. Smith’s ingenious play, first performed in 2019, imagines three Noras, each inhabiting a different moment in time. The Nora of 1918 is gracefully got up in a long cream coat with a fur collar and is played with decorous charm by Kirsty Rider. The Nora of 1968 wears an unbecoming, shorter blue coat and is strikingly played by Jodie McNee who shows what it is to feel physically trapped, coiling in on herself like a stowaway within her own body. The Nora of 2018 is played with unhappy glamour by Yusra Warsama in a flowingly loose turquoise wrap but is as trapped as her predecessors in this eternal (we pray not too eternal) triangle.
Amanda Stoodley’s set looks like a bistro, with occasional tables covered in lace cloths, and brittle wooden chairs. It begins with the Noras encircling the stage in a wintry rush, burdened with Christmas shopping. The modern Nora has grabbed a tiny, cut-price Christmas tree to take home. Smith skilfully portions out speech between them, their narrative is shared. For each woman, money is an issue and Smith contributes to Ibsen’s understanding of how Norah’s lack of economic independence is partly responsible for the instability of her marriage. She is good, too, on secrets and the difficulty women sometimes face in telling each other how they actually feel. And she has a fine sense of detail. She describes, in the household of each Nora, the pervasive scent of lavender and its bid for calm.
