The Lady From the Sea

Published Tuesday 6 May 2008 at 18:45 by Natasha Tripney

This is the second production in the Arcola’s short Ibsen season. In contrast to the taut and naturalistic approach taken by their staging of An Enemy of the People, it is a rich, lyrical thing, heavy with symbolism. It is also rather more diffuse than the previous production, less focused.

The play takes the form of a fable about Ellida, the second wife of a doctor, who is haunted by a past liaison with a sailor. This relationship has a potent hold over her and since then she has felt a strong connection with the sea, to the point where she can never be content in her current life as she feels that she will one day be called back to the ocean, and she will have no choice but to follow.

It is choice, and the need to be able to choose one’s future, to have liberty in one’s life, especially within marriage, that is the guiding theme of the play. As Ellida is pushed to the edge of insanity by her plight, her stepdaughters are drifting into unions of their own, the elder with her former tutor.

Lia Williams is a captivating Ellida, red-haired and strikingly clad in green, eyes wide and shining, impossible not to watch. She is ably supported by Frank Hackett, as her husband, and Fiona O’Shaughnessy and Alison McKenna as her two, vastly different, stepdaughters.