Written for Culture Wars
Nora Helmer, that staid icon of female emancipation, so often little more than a door slam, has been thoroughly defrosted at the Young Vic. In Simon Stephens’s new version of Ibsen’s classic, as played by Hattie Morahan under Carrie Cracknell’s direction, she is a tangle of contradictions and her final flight is as naive as it is empowered; less a clarion call than a tragic compromise.
The three of them have worked to unbalance us and our presumptions and, in doing so, make us look at the Helmers' household on that fateful Christmas afresh. While it may not be the most convincingly natuaralistic production of Ibsen’s classic, it is among the most legible and, moreover, the most complex in its diagnosis. This is not just standard boy-girl patriarchy, but a swirling eddy of behavioural patterns and prejudices that conflict and contradict one another.
The production’s first trick – and it’s a very good one – is to making the setting unproblematic. This is not Ibsenland (not, incidentally, a place where dreams come true), but nor is it our modern world. Instead, it is a loose hybrid. The silhouettes are period – high-waisted skirts, waistcoats, detachable collars – but the behaviour has none of the accompanying stiff formality. Nor does Cracknell’s production strain for contemporary resonance; it’s quite content to keep the house staff and a gramaphone. She recognises that we have not come, first and foremost, to see the faithful representation of late 19th Century Danish life, with the precise white reflected sunlight of Scandinavia at this or that time of year. We have come to see people, to understand more of what makes them tick and, just for starters, Cracknell deserves credit for letting nothing get in the way of this.
As a story, A Doll’s House is a suspense thriller of sorts. Its drama is motored by the question as to whether Nora will prevent her husband from discovering of her debt before it’s paid off. It is a car crash in such slow motion that it teases you into thinking that impact might be averted. Nora desperately tries to stave off the inevitable.
Seemingly taking her lead from Katie Mitchell, Cracknell puts the Helmers’ flat onstage in full, rather than just presenting the end on living room as per usual. Ian MacNeil’s design rotates, so that we see the sitting room and Torvald’s office on one side of a thin corridor and the couple’s dining room and bedroom on the other. As such, we see the near misses and the noses that she’s operating underneath and the sheer tension of Ibsen’s plot is restored.
In fact, the play’s stakes have been stretched as well. The couple’s third child, for example, is a babe-in-arms and Nora’s fraught desperation is matched in the dizzying spin cycle. Essentially, you see her frantically attempting to compartmentalise her life; to keep her husband, her creditor (Nils Krogstad) and her friendly admirer (Dr Rank) in separate rooms. Morahan has the frazzled look of someone playing three games of table tennis simultaneously.
This is one of the fundamental inequalities in the marriage: Torvald has a private space, his office, and Nora hasn’t. She resorts to keeping things in boxes under the bed, shoving bags into side rooms, concealing sweets. The flat is like an observation lab: every room has large, clear windows, except Torvald’s office with its frosted glass. Cracknell mistakenly lets Nora enter that space on a couple of occasions. It should, like the post-box, be out of bounds.
Nora often seems unsympathetic to start, before we realise the full extent of her debt and the noble reasons for its existence. She looks spoilt and irresponsible, coaxing pocket money out of her husband only to leak it in tips and treats. Ibsen wrong-foots us in order to then reveal the self-sacrificing saint underneath. However, Stephens and Morahan combine to make her less sympathetic and, while they don’t outweigh them, Nora’s negative traits here offset any good intentions.
Morahan’s Nora is a social-climber, a typical middle-class WAG. Manipulative – “I know exactly how to get my own way with him” – and slyly persistent, her repertoire of tricks includes doe-eyes, sulky pouts and a faux-offence that almost always *gasp* RE-SENTs the accusation, whatever it may be. What’s more, the trip to Italy that supposedly saved her husband’s life seems more like a family holiday than ever. No doctor’s orders are mentioned and it looks a case of stress relief, perhaps less for his benefit than for hers. She starts to seem more self-saving than self-sacrificing, and her naivety becomes a lot less excusable as a result.
And it is naivety here. Her downfall is in assuming that Krogstad will, like her husband, play nicely. Failing that, that he will fall for her feminine tricks. She doesn’t account for the fact that pleasing her might not be at the forefront of his mind and, as such, Nick Fletcher’s Krogstad seems unusually reasonable. There is no gleeful malice nor bitter resent in his actions, just a man doing what he must to keep his social standing steady.
However, while Nora’s character flaws don’t prevent you sympathising with her situation – both the hold that Krogstad has over her and her flawed marriage with Torvald – they do temper it. To some extent, she has only herself to blame. She has been quite happy to be the banker’s wife, to coast along in a perfect little flat with her perfect little children, watching her husband’s salary and stature increasing. She’s as complicit as she’s ever been here, working the circumstances of her marriage to her own advantage.
Dominic Rowan’s Torvald isn’t the patronising and gooey version, the infatuated fool gushing over his “little skylark.” If anything, Nora gets the better of him because he’s too sure that he’s got the measure of her. Certainty and self-assurance are his defining features. Rowan’s Torvald believes that he does not need his wife and her role – like the bows on the Christmas tree that match her red dress – is merely decorative. She is regularly framed in terms of performance, and when Torvald calls her his greatest possession, he is thinking along the lines of a Rolex or diamond cufflinks. His wife is an accessory; evidence of his own success and attractiveness, testament to a perfect life with all the trimmings. Yet, when she wears his green jacket, you spot the image of holly, tucked behind a light in the dining room; spiked leaves protecting the red berries. “Take off my jacket,” he orders, reneging on that side of the relationship. This is the moment that Nora becomes wholly aware of their imbalance; that she has tried to play her role and he has failed to do likewise. That the whole nature of marriage is not sacred, but contractual and compromised.
The tragedy is that, to finally break the inequality, Nora must match Torvald’s certainty: “I’ve never felt so clear. I’ve never felt so certain,” she says at the end. Not for nothing does Stephens hook in a little bit of Mrs T. (Nora: “I don’t know if there’s any such thing [as society].”) She knows that she can trust no one but herself, that she is finally alone and that the self-sufficiency of others has forced her to become self-sufficient as well. Yet, even at the same time, Nora admits to complete uncertainty with regards everything else, in particular the institutions that make up the establishment: religion, society, responsibilities, family. As marriage tumbles in her eyes, so too does society and its pillars. Nothing is sacred, everything is compromise, everyone is out for themselves.
Here, Nora’s exit is both emancipation and eradication at once. It is, she says in two consecutive sentences to Kristine, “the most wonderful thing” and “so terrible…it can’t happen.” Nora’s escape is her tearing herself into a thousand pieces. She had initially hoped it might be the IOU, but, in the end, it’s her that gets destroyed. She leaves not only the marital home, but everything she has ever known. Nora walks out on society and its thousand grubby little compromises and slams the door behind her.
Photograph: Johan Persson
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