It seems almost redundant to call a production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House “timely”. The play, which centres on the stultifying marriage of an upper-class woman, is inevitably topical, with the advancement of women’s rights sadly never quite having progressed far enough to make Ibsen’s play feel dated. It is disappointing, then, that Annie Ryan’s new production of the play, adapted by Belinda McKeon and retitled Nora, which runs as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, attempts to force its relevance upon us.
McKeon (who began her career as a playwright but has since become an acclaimed novelist, showered with hosannas for her rather pedestrian sophomore novel, Tender) has set the play in 2025, a world in which women’s rights, LGBT rights and black rights have become more restricted than they are now. Nora and Turlough, the central couple, are wealthy art dealers who live “Down Here” (a protected region defined against the more dangerous “Up There”).
However, McKeon’s adaptation only occasionally manages to make the disparate themes of gender, race, art and dystopia cohere. Scenes in which these ideas are explicitly stated, as when Krysta, an old friend of Nora’s, arrives at her apartment seeking political asylum and relates the danger of being black in her home country, or when Emmy, Nora’s daughter, is undressed on stage and critically assessed by her parents, seem heavy-handed. It is the fleeting moments of micro-aggression, when Turlough offhandedly refers to Krysta’s work as “edgy”, the inconsistent use of “my” and “our” to describe the ownership of Turlough and Nora’s art gallery, that demonstrate society’s insidious influence.
As in many Ibsen plays, the state of the world in which the characters live is manifest without ever being spelled out. For Ibsen, society’s influence is inescapable, and the personal is always political.
McKeon’s uneven adaptation, which admittedly contains two clever twists to the original text with regards to Nora and Krysta’s relationship and the play’s notorious final moments, is buoyed by a strong cast and Eoghan Carrick’s snappy direction. Declan Conlon is, as usual, pitch-perfect as the once-bohemian, now-bourgeois Turlough, who, you sense, probably sees himself as a very progressive husband.
Clare Perkins is wonderfully sincere as Krysta, although I spent much of the play staring at the back of her head (the sightlines rarely work for the onstage seats). Chris Hallem as Ron, the couple’s friend, and Peter Gaynor, Kroeger, give good performances, although both are hamstrung by their characters’ function within the play, the former as occasional comic relief and the latter as a means of exposing Nora’s deception (here a vague controversy over the authenticity of a painting).
There are moments in which Venetia Bowe makes Emmy appear like an intelligent young woman, although she occasionally descends into a caricature of a flouncing teenager. Unfortunately, Annie Ryan, as Nora, is the play’s weak link. Despite giving a fine performance, her voice lacks the range needed to express the variance in emotion towards the play’s conclusion.
The set, by Paul O’Mahony, is just the kind of black, white and glass affair you would expect to adorn the residence of a tasteful couple, and Katie Crowely’s costumes fit right in, as does Philip Stewart’s unobtrusive but effective sound design, providing Nora and Turlough’s party for the art world glitterati with a chic ambience.
Despite my reservations about McKeon’s script, there is no doubt that she has the dramatic craft to make each scene feel concise, and Eoghan Carrick matches this pace to make Nora a very zippy, and quite enjoyable, 80 minutes.
