Nora: A Doll’s House at Young Vic review ★★★☆☆ by Ifan Llewelyn
Perhaps one of the widest-read pieces of theatre ever put to the page, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a classic. It’s passed through more hands than a rusty penny. In its 141 years, it’s been on and off stages and curriculums across the globe, playing everywhere from Broadway to your local village hall. This February, it’s back on the stage of the Young Vic for the first time in eight years. This time around its vehicle is a radical new take on the sacrosanct play from playwright Stef Smith in Nora: A Doll’s House. Bringing a zealous feminist, queer and multi-textual approach to the piece, this is a brave re-imagining that bites off more than it can chew.
In this production, our protagonist Nora is spliced in three and spread across three moments of revolution for women. Nora 1 (Anna Russell-Martin) lives in the tide-turn of the #MeToo movement in 2018. Nora 2 (Natalie Klamar) is experiencing the sexual revolution of the late ’60s as contraception and abortion become legal. Finally, Nora 3 (Amaka Okafor) is in a time of women gaining their political voice, getting the vote in 1918. We see each Nora experience each plot point as it ripples across one hundred years of women’s history.
The bare workings of Smith’s adaptation are clear and quite simple as she reduces the play’s action to its bare plot points, then filling in the blank spaces accordingly. We meet Nora, an unfulfilled housewife, arriving home having splashed out on Christmas gifts despite the family’s struggling finances. Her husband is due a pay bump. She has previously taken a drastic step, behind her husband’s back, to keep her family afloat during the aforementioned hard times. Her secret is discovered by one of her husband’s employees who blackmails Nora into convincing her husband to not make him redundant. In 2018, her husband works at a pay-day loan firm. In 1968, he’s working in the emerging credit sector. In 1918, he’s at the bank. You get the picture.
Though an interesting thought experiment, there’s a little too much going on here. The work covers a lot very simply as opposed to doing a little and taking time to really flesh it out. It also often breaks the cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell”. Throw into the mix a suppressed sexuality, sexual violence, domestic violence, addiction, alcoholism and postpartum depression (to name a few added elements) you have an overloaded plate that makes the meal a lot less appetising.
Having said that, this is still an entertaining evening of theatre. Mostly down to Natalie Klamar’s turn as Nora 2, circa 1968, whose performance is an absolute sensation. As the flitty, fretting housewife living in a society quickly progressing without her, she manages to simultaneously play a Carry On caricature while also giving the role heart and empathy. Throughout, she’s a veritable delight to behold.
Nora: A Doll’s House is running ’til 21st March at Young Vic, 66 The Cut, Waterloo SE1 8LZ. youngvic.org
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