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A Doll’s House review

“Jessica Chastain stars in bloodless adaptation”

Jessica Chastain valiantly muddles through a bloodless production

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Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist production of A Doll’s House is blunt and deadpan. It emphasises distilled, detached interaction and Jessica Chastain is left adrift in a spartan production.  

Amy Herzog’s adaptation of Ibsen’s original does not change the thrust of the play: Nora (Chastain) is desperately trying to keep her secret debt from her husband Torvald (Arian Moayed) while being blackmailed by loan shark Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan) and flirting with Torvald’s best friend Dr Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton). Once her lies are revealed, she discovers her relationship with her husband is not what she thought it was.

In a show famous for a slamming door, there is no set: simply the painted wall of the back of the theatre in black and grey. The date 1879 is projected on that wall at the start, but the production is not rooted in any time or place; there are no props besides chairs. Chastain is simply seated on a rotating turntable. The characters occasionally touch but, more often, they just stand or sit and look at each other.

Leaning more towards expressionistic horror than drama, to dial-up Nora’s increasing panic, a lighting grid slowly descends from the ceiling, pressuring her from above. When Krogstad (a robotic Onaodowan) first corners her, all we can see is the top of the back of his head and his shadow on the wall. A box of light around them tightens like a vice.

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Herzog’s writing feels as shaved to the bone as the direction – brutal and awkward at times. Her Torvald (Moayed at his creepiest) is irritatingly obnoxious from the jump, and when he calls Nora “baby”, we cringe. Herzog’s Nora is more an active participant in her own mistakes than she is in Ibsen’s original.

But Chastain has to make all her character’s emotional leaps and bounds while mostly sitting still in a chair – sometimes it is like watching a frog being boiled alive. We understand she is trapped in her world, but the staging stultifies the material and gives the performers a minuscule range to work from.

While framed in contrast to Nora’s marriage, Chastain comes alive when she and Thornton flirt. Staging the moment as if engaging in breathy phone-sex – full of pregnant pauses and innuendo – for a moment, the play is made flesh, but this liveness is fleeting.

The production’s heavy-handed stylistic symbolism and clinical simplicity guts the humanity of the play. Parallels between characters from Ibsen’s text are lost, relationships are opaque, the characters all sit in grey sameness, there is a refrigerator chill where emotion should be.

Worse, the self-serious, tone-deaf direction dials up the sense of ridiculousness. When the audience laughs, it may not be with the play but at it, which feels like a questionable directorial choice. Still, despite this, Nora’s final monologue remains depressingly relevant to women today. And what is there to laugh about there?

Production Details
Production nameA Doll’s House
VenueHudson Theatre
LocationNew York
Starts13/02/2023
Ends04/06/2023
Press night03/03/2023
Running time1hr 50mins
AuthorHenrik Ibsen
AdapterAmy Herzog
ComposerAlva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto
DirectorJamie Lloyd
Associate directorJonathan Glew
ChoreographerJennifer Rias
Set designerSoutra Gilmour
Costume designerSoutra Gilmour, Enver Chakartash
Lighting designerJon Clark
Sound designerBen Ringham, Max Ringham
Casting directorJim Carnahan, Alexandre Bleau
Cast includesArian Moayed, Okieriete Onaodowan, Michael Patrick Thornton, Jessica Chastain, Jesmille Darbouze, Tasha Lawrence
Production managerFrank Lombardi
ProducerAmbassador Theatre Group Productions, The Jamie Lloyd Company
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