In the famous final showdown, his intransigence is deeply shocking. But ultimately, his underlining of Torvald’s inability to see the world from anything but a dominating male perspective pays dividends. Rowan (and the translation) lean slightly too far toward the predictable stuffed-shirt approach to the role of Torvald. Instead of passively indicating the trouble she’s in, she races to keep control, forcing audiences to run with her to catch up with the emotional undertow. The key to the excitement she generates is that the more terrified she grows, the faster she reacts. The physical relationship between Morahan and Rowan is particularly convincing and this elegantly costumed, confident Nora is ringingly safe in her naivety, convinced that her sexual power will be able to control her husband. Bright-eyed and high spirited, she starts out as coquettish, the little bird of her husband’s fantasy. It’s an actors’ cliche to say that she’s “in the moment” but nothing in Morahan’s high-wire act feels premeditated. And that, in turn, strengthens the relationship between her and Nora. His very plausibility frees Wise up to present Kristine as a more fully rounded character.
As traditionally presented, her move to help Nora by marrying Krogstadt makes her look noble but sad and weak. His easeful presence makes the situation horribly plausible and, therefore, all the more terrifying when desperation sets in and he begins tightening the screw.Įqually, his initially reasonable, calm position makes his crucial past and future relationship with Nora’s old friend Kristine (Susannah Wise) far more believable. But Fletcher presents him as a man who hopes for the best. Flaunting incriminating evidence, he is usually played as obviously wicked. It’s typical of the production that as the blackmailing Krogstadt, Nick Fletcher appears utterly reasonable. Equally strongly, having Nora being blackmailed or confiding secrets to others when the so-far oblivious Torvald just feet away in the adjoining room makes the tension rocket. Having Nora move so easily and swiftly through the house underlines her need to escape the prying eyes and ears of, say, her servants. That’s down to both Stephens’ unadorned dialogue and the breaking up of long scenes via turntable shifts that show characters moving from room to room. There are no anachronisms of speech, but the rhythm and pace of the dialogue feel strikingly immediate. The period setting remains 1878, with all that the date implies about the roles of husbands and wives, and the translation by Simon Stephens (“Bluebird,” the upcoming “Harper Regan” at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company) cleaves firmly to Ibsen’s vision.
But as the plot thickens, the spiralling movement takes on the power of metaphor as everything the household represents seems to be tightening noose-like around Nora’s swanlike neck.
On a literal level, this is a dollhouse, the constricting home in which Nora lives, childlike, in what she finally comes to understand as a state ignorance. We catch glimpses of Torvald (Dominic Rowan) at work in his study as servants come and go bringing the Christmas tree into the living room as Nora attempts to manage proceedings and sort out the presents she has bought.
Ian MacNeil’s design takes its cue from the title, presenting four rooms and linked corridors of the Helmers’ household swirling round on a turntable to Stuart Earl’s plaintive but insistent music. That much is immediately made evident in her production’s opening image. Not that Cracknell is afraid of a bold gesture.
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