I was in a £12 seat for this one (Upper Circle, Row G) and was expecting to have to squint and peer over people’s heads, but the view was actually extremely good. The only annoyance was that the seat was a bench and not being able to lean back became a bit of a pain after a while.
I was looking forward to seeing Hattie Morahan play Nora after seeing her as Elinor in what I consider to be the best adaptation of a Jane Austen novel I’ve ever seen: the BBC’s 2008 Sense and Sensibility mini-series. I was also interested in seeing Dominic Rowan as Torvald, as I had enjoyed his performances as Touchstone in As You Like It and Henry VIII in Henry VIII at the Globe.
The set was almost perfect; just the kind of set I would expect and want to see for A Doll’s House. It consisted of the rooms of the Helmers’ flat on a round revolving stage – a living room, study, entrance hall, bedroom and kitchen. It was very effective when the stage did several full revolutions (or should that be rotations?) and you could see the different activities taking place within the flat, e.g. Nora getting ready for a party in her bedroom, the maid rushing about, Torvald standing in the hall. One of my favourite bits was when Nora playfully chased her two sons through the rooms as the stage turned. I’m a sucker for big, elaborate sets, and since the house/flat is an important part of the play (all the action takes place within it) I think it should be shown in a reasonably detailed manner, evoking an atmosphere of cosiness, security and restrictiveness. My only set-related quibble is that I would have preferred the living room to look overtly Victorian.
I thought Hattie Morahan as Nora was good overall, but her put-on baby voice made it hard to understand what she was saying at times. I wasn’t sure about her in the first scene – she made Nora exceedingly annoying – but I warmed to her. When I read the play (which was a long time ago) I saw Nora as consciously assuming the unthreatening, childlike role to a much greater extent than she was portrayed as doing in this production. However, her speech at the end of the play indicates that she had been unconscious of dumbing herself down and that she had never really developed a personality of her own, so Morahan’s interpretation would appear to be legitimate.
Talking of baby voices, there was a REAL baby in the play! The baby was excellent: unfazed by the cooing of the audience at its entrance and exit, not minding being passed between the nurse and Nora, and – AND – when Nora passed it back to the nurse after cooing over it, the baby actually reached out its little hand to her as though it wanted to be held again! It was almost as good as the puppet baby in Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty.
Krogstad I didn’t think was sufficiently sinister. I know he’s not supposed to be evil so much as a victim of circumstance, but I would have preferred his scenes to have contained a greater sense of foreboding. He didn’t come across as genuinely threatening at all.
The music was well-suited to the play. I particularly liked the bit where Nora danced the tarantella to Spanish music, which slowly morphed into a Donnie Darko-esque moody, ominous instrumental.
When I read A Doll’s House at school, a friend and I thought it would be cool if, during the big showdown at the end, Nora suddenly pulled off her Victorian garb to reveal modern clothing and started lip synching to this song:
While I still think that would be kind of cool, I no longer think it would be a good idea for reasons relating to the erosion of dramatic tension etc. etc. So, anyway, the Showdown between Nora and Torvald was...pretty good. In a way I wanted it to be more dramatic. But it was realistically done. Even when you know she’s going to leave, it’s still something of a surprise when she does.
Performance/production rating: 4/5
My enjoyment rating: 3.5/5
I don’t have anything lined up theatre-wise until the end of November, unfortunately. I’m sorry to disappoint all (one) of you, but sometimes the creation of one’s own art must take priority over experiencing that of others.
Next: The Cherry Orchard
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