Theatre review: The Lady from the Sea

Simon Stone is known for his versions of classic plays, that are sometimes not so much loose adaptations as tangentially connected to the originals at best, and I've found the results very mixed in the past. For The Lady from the Sea he strikes a better balance though, in something with very distinct and current themes but a structure and basis that still feels recognisably by Henrik Ibsen. Five years ago celebrated neuroscientist Edward (Andrew Lincoln) lost his first wife to suicide, and is still dealing with the fallout with their two daughters Asa (Gracie Oddie-James,) a gay postgraduate student who's secretly saving up for a PhD at Yale by opening an OnlyFans, and blunt, brooding teenager Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike.) Egg has managed to move on and find some stability in his life though, with his second marriage to the younger Ellida (Alicia Vikander.)

But it's Ellida who will cause the biggest upheaval when a man from her past is released from prison, and she has to confront trauma even she'd forgotten she supressed: When she was 15 she met Finn (Brendan Cowell,) and after a brief relationship and an extreme event when they were both part of a climate change protest group, she swore she'd always be his.

Now Finn has turned up at their countryside home to hold her to her promise, and Ellida is genuinely torn between the life she's chosen and whether she should be bound to the debt she owes Finn - all the while having to confront the fact that the man who's shadowed so much of her life is actually her statutory rapist. It's part of the major undercurrent about daddy issues that runs through the play - making Egg's daughters mixed race also gives Stone another avenue to explore this in, as growing up in a very white, rural community has led them to seek out an alternative father figure who can relate to that, in Egg's supremely awkward (even compared to the other men in the family) friend and colleague Lyle (John Macmillan.)

Being Ibsen the other recurring theme is death, and as well as the deaths in the past that still haunt the characters there's also a very present doomed figure in Heath (Joe Alwyn,) a distant cousin from Cornwall who's come to get medical advice from Egg, only to find out he's got rapid-onset ALS. The fact that he's got a year to live makes him an object of fascination for the morbid Hilda, who starts to fall for him - you know she loves a Cornish boy, she enjoys nights in Penzance, Redruth in the afternoon.

Caution, the front row may get wet

Hilda's incredibly blunt mix of affection and callousness means that the play's morbid themes never become overwhelming as the characters all start to reflect her incredibly dark sense of humour around it - her father's line about Dignitas elicited as many winces as laughs from the audience, and the atmosphere Stone and his cast have built means we can take in the psychological depths the characters explore without it becoming too grim. Looking back at my review of the only other time I've seen a version of this play, I see I thought it felt a bit too short with some subplots brutally cut, and this much longer production seems to confirm that, really digging into all the characters and giving them their time.

Also hugely contributing is the design, with Lizzie Clachan's set and Nick Schlieper's lighting providing a genuine Astonishing Coup de Théâtre^TM as the show goes from a pretty naturalistic first half to an expressionistic second: The sunlit garden turns into a stark black landscape with the actors confronting their personal demons under torrential rain; the stage gradually lowers to have them sloshing about in a puddle, before a lighting change reveals it to have turned into a swimming pool big enough to do laps in for the final act.

This is a long but satisfying evening - in the past I've felt Stone's changes have come close to missing the point entirely, but here they feel like they're still telling a story that Ibsen would have recognised, while making them relevant. I particularly liked the way the mermaid metaphors of the original get replaced by a backstory involving an offshore oil rig to justify the titular description of Ellida. Dark and profound without becoming overbearing, this really works.

The Lady from the Sea by Simon Stone after Henrik Ibsen is booking until the 8th of November at the Bridge Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: John Persson.