After five years away from the London stage because of work commitments in America, Future Dame Noma Dumezweni also makes a triumphant return to play Nora, who evidently made the right decision if her financial success on her own is anything to go by. But she might be on less secure legal footing than she thought.
When she left, she got her husband Torvald (Brían F. O'Byrne) to agree to divorce her, something that in 1879 Norway was almost entirely at the man's discretion. Now she's discovered he never filed the papers, which means as a married woman many of her actions, both personal and business-related, over the last 15 years could be considered void, and in some cases illegal. She's back to ask him to make good on his promise, but it might not just be pride that's keeping him from acknowledging his wife left him - he too had taken advantage of the situation in ways he'd rather weren't made public.
Although the four-strong cast do occasionally all share the stage, A Doll's House, Part 2 is mainly set up as one-on-one confrontations between Nora and the people she left behind, and James Macdonald's production zones in on this by using one of the Donmar's rare reconfigurations to put the fighters at the centre of the audience. The most elaborate part of Rae Smith's set is the shell of the house itself, but when it rises at the start is a stage the colour of dried blood with only four chairs and a side table on it, leaving the space clear for the verbal battles. To be honest from the not-so-cheap-any-more seats I like this in-the-round setup for the Donmar much better than the usual one, certainly with regard to sightlines: The Circle's safety rails still block a bit of the stage edges, but with no back wall there's no projections or action to be missed from the sides, and the staging forces the blocking to take everyone in*.
As well as her meetings with Torvald, Nora is also forced to confront the way doing what was best for her impacted on the women left behind, beginning with housekeeper Anne Marie (June Watson,) who had all but raised Nora, and then ended up doing the same for her children. The respectful old servant gradually cracks and increasingly swears as she explains how looking after Nora's family meant she had to neglect her own. But the sucker-punch is the opponent she knows least, as Nora tries to get the daughter she last saw as a toddler to help convince Torvald: Emmy (Patricia Allison) proves to be as formidable a young woman as she'd been told, but not necessarily in ways her mother expected or approves of.
Hnath's play itself left me a bit ambivalent - not quite to the point of being unconvinced that it needed to be written (he's not the first to suggest "what Nora did next" and is unlikely to be the last) but there's certainly moments where I felt like answering the question misses the point somewhat about the open-ended way Ibsen leaves his story. Especially in the first scene with Anne Marie, it feels like the writer's just taking analysis of A Doll's House and its themes, and putting it in the characters' mouths. Hnath's version of Nora is also colder and less likeable than Ibsen's: She shows little interest in her children - it's not clear enough if this is a coping strategy - but is hurt when Emmy shows similar disinterest in her. Though I did like some of the ways her double standards are shown up: Nora's memories of Emmy as "an easy birth" and "smiled a lot as a baby" aren't too far from Torvald's generic compliments of Nora as "beautful" and "perfect." And while I liked the way the story narrowed down the way Nora's been held back as partly being down to something as banal as bureaucracy, some of the plotting definitely feels fuzzy - spoilers in the footnote†.
But if Macdonald might have sometimes felt like he was staging the Cliffs notes on A Doll's House, the end result is impressive, not least of all because of the central presence of Dumezweni, worth the wait and extraordinary as ever. There's something she does where she can burst into simultaneous sobbing and laughter out of nothing, as if she's been suppressing something that's finally exploded in multiple directions, and it's ridiculously affecting, one of those acting superpowers you can't quite get your head round. Her stage presence is bolstered by the star of Smith's design, a dramatic green dress used in the play as a symbol of Nora's self-made success. Together with Azusa Ono's lighting, it helps create a silhouette that makes the opening of this play as dramatic as the original's closing. It's not an impact that the writing quite lives up to, but with supreme confidence the cast and creatives have made an absorbing drama out of an imperfect script.
A Doll's House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath is booking until the 6th of August at the Donmar Warehouse.
Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
*something about how shallow the thrust is in the usual configuration seems to make directors constantly underestimate how much of the audience is on the sides, and play straight to the centre
†Emmy's plan makes no sense: If the judge was blackmailing Nora because she committed accidental fraud, why wouldn't he also blackmail her for committing an intentional one? Or was it assumed he'd buy the forged death certificate despite knowing perfectly well that Nora was alive and well and writing bestsellers? Also, did I miss something about how Nora eventually solved her predicament? Why didn't she need the divorce after all?
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