A Doll's House
Rosemary Branch Theatre, London

Stuart Simpson

Ibsen's world was very different from our own. Marriage simply doesn't mean the same thing anymore; divorce is just not that big a deal. Can Ibsen's play survive the end of marriage? To its credit, the Dale Theater Kompani does not try to show A Doll's House in a contemporary setting, and interestingly we are left with a nineteenth century take on a very modern issue.

There are a lot of good things to say about this production. It would be worth seeing if only to hear Sarah Head's Songbird sing. And although the Rosemary Branch Theatre may be an intimate setting, the presence and projection of the cast will make you feel as though you are in the front row at the National. But what makes this production is that the audience is forced to see the play as Ibsen's contemporaries, and because of this we are shown a new take on a contemporary theme.

When first staged, A Doll's House shocked audiences, and this is something no production would be able to recreate. But take out the shock factor and we are left with an individual trying to make sense of their place in the world and how they relate to others, a common theme in contemporary culture (see reviews of Lost in Translation or Trip's Cynch/Three More Sleepless Nights). While this theme may be timeless, Ibsen's understanding of what this might mean is a world apart from our own, and it is so much the better for that.

In the course of the play Nora learns that everything important she thought she knew about her husband and her life is a lie. She realises that she understands nothing about the world in which she lives. As she confronts her husband, and resolves to leave him, the Dale Theatre Kompani pushes the idea of a doll's house a little too far. Nora transforms from the living songbird into a wooden doll, with a rigid stance and vacant gaze. Ibsen's language would have been sufficient to demonstrate this transformtion, but there is no real harm. For the first time we see Nora behave as a woman, as an individual, and in fact the vacant gaze, though rather odd, serves to highlight this tranformation. We are seeing that as Nora begins to understand what she must do - leave her husband - the world in which she lives, and the person she has been, become unreal to her.

Nora learns that her most intimate relationships are a fiction and that she cannot relate to and does not understand the world. Today's cultural take on this theme may have been for Nora to reflect endlessly on how she forms these relationships, think Sex and the City, or to find some value in this separation, think Lost in Translation. But Ibsen's Nora decides that if she is to find her place in the world, to discover who she really is or can be, then the only place to look is the world.

Till 7 March 2004