The Stage

Nora

Published Friday 3 February 2012 at 13:52 by Richard Edmonds

Ibsen’s Nora Helmer is a woman up against it.

There have been others, of course. Among them Juliet, Cleopatra, Hedda Gabler and Strindberg’s Miss Julie, all of them combatants in a sex war.

Nora (the excellent Penny Layden) is viewed by both her father and her banker husband Krogstad (Stuart Laing in an equally fine performance) as a kind of superficial, spendthrift bimbo. In a male dominated society she finds it impossible to be herself, and although she is instrumental in saving her husband, Krogstad’s, life, she commits forgery to raise the funds, and disaster follows.

Penny Layden’s negotiates carefully through Ibsen’s map of deceit, humiliation and final loss of home and children with care and resolution.

With her husband she talks about things which don’t matter, hiding the reality which lies behind a mask of childish frivolity.

But whether Ingmar Bergman’s take on Ibsen’s masterwork achieves much by up-dating it to the present day is conjectural. The awful price 19th century women once paid for marital misdemeanours has diminished in today’s indulgently liberal society, along with the high drama Ibsen once used to highlight Nora’s dilemma.

The Belgrade’s production under Patricia Benecke has its moments of intensity, where you find yourself grieving over the disaster which finally overtakes Kronstadt, although in all fairness some of Ibsen’s wonderful writing has been muted in the switch to a contemporary idiom.

In fact, watching Nora in a skimpy, knee-length dress, scampering around a dull featureless set (replete with low padded seats, goldfish tank and some careless light spills) finally left this reviewer wishing Bergman had left the old boy’s original 19th century play alone and gone off and written one of his own instead.

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