The three Noras take turns playing the role as her world seems to start crumbling around her, but they all stay on stage throughout - sometimes echoing each other's dialogue, sometimes offering silent support to the alternate versions of themselves.
Aside from the constant time jumps the story remains essentially linear: Whatever the year, Nora has supported her family through her husband's years of ill health - here explicitly depression-related - but he's now back on his feet and about to start a new job that should get them out of debt. But just as she starts to relax she's blackmailed with the truth about how she only kept them financially afloat by committing fraud. Much of the play is her desperate three days around Christmas as she tries to keep the truth from her husband and their relationship as it is. But when the dust's settled, is that really what she wants?
Luke Norris plays all the husbands, each with his own different brand of patronising control over his wife; Mark Arends is all the blackmailers, a role that’s been played more sympathetically in recent years and which is also the case here; and Zephryn Taitte is all the terminally ill, hopelessly romantic doctors (or in this case, pharmacists.) One of the things I liked most about Smith’s writing is that despite everything going on there’s still a lot of clarity to the storytelling. I’ve seen a lot of riffs on classic stories and they often come with an assumption that everyone watching is well-versed in the original and can follow the twists and tricks added to the narrative. But a complete novice to Ibsen’s original would be able to tell you its basic plot after seeing Nora, which sends its three protagonists through the same journey while giving them each their own spin on the character. Klamar’s Nora for instance, and only hers, is also dealing with recognising the suppressed feelings she’s had for her friend Christine (a character who’s also played in rotation by the three Norae.)
With A Doll’s House having become most famous for its gender politics it’s easy to forget how much it’s also about money and the cycle of despair debt can bring about; it’s clever how Smith’s spreading of the story across the years refocuses that in the way that the husband’s new job changes: 1918 Tom is a bank manager, but 1968 Tom is specifically going to be put in charge of the revolutionary new credit cards, and 2018 Tom’s got a job with a payday loan company.
Elizabeth Freestone’s production is very good on symbolism and bringing the play’s themes subtly to the fore in general: Tom Piper’s set is in essence simple, bare apart from a couple of pieces of furniture and a symbolic doorway for each of the Noras. But looming upstage is a series of smashed walls and a dark, almost apocalyptic landscape. It feels like a symbol of the exploding family inside the walls Tom mistakenly thinks of as safe and cosy, but by the end it also seems a comment on the unknown Nora is going to step out into: What felt to me like the most radical departure from the original is the look, however brief, at how their lives after leaving the house might pan out, and in a final reminder that it’s not just gender politics that’s being examined here, the roughest ride might be for the Nora walking into a present-day Austerity Britain. I found Nora a very satisfying show: Its wealth of ideas doesn’t get in the way of the storytelling while you’re watching it, but leaves you with plenty to unpack afterwards.
Nora: A Doll’s House by Stef Smith, based on A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, is booking until the 21st of March at the Young Vic.
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
No comments:
Post a Comment