Ingenious and inspiring twist on an Ibsen classic
It’s one of the most significant plays in European drama and it concludes with perhaps the most famous and far-reaching scene in the modern theatrical canon: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) climaxes in a door-slamming exit, as Nora Helmer abandons her lawyer husband, her three children and a world of stifling subordination and heads off into the unknown, seemingly walking towards a new age of female emancipation.
In Wife, Samuel Adamson ingeniously revisits the play, and springboards from reprised versions of that scene to explore shifting theatrical approaches and evolving societal norms about marriage and personal
relations. The evening moves across four related generations where a decision to stay put or walk out has had lasting repercussions.
That may immediately make it sound like a pensive and worthy experiment, and I was a little wary of Adamson’s response, precisely because he is such an ardent Ibsenite. He has adapted the play in the past, to acclaim, but didn’t elicit the same rapture when he transposed Little Eyolf to the Fifties English coast 10 years ago at the National in Mrs Affleck. Would he be able to see the Norwegian wood for the trees? Undoubtedly Wife contains a dense bundle of references and a cluster, too, of contrivances, but it works.
And in the first half, it works brilliantly, drawing on the author’s ingrained knowledge to produce something fresh, original, playful and provocative. We initially watch a conventional staging of that final scene – in 1959 – then go backstage, where the actress playing Nora (Sirine Saba’s enjoyably spirited Suzannah) entertains in her dressing room a married couple at tense variance – she (Karen Fishwick’s Daisy) is a gushing fan, he (Joshua James’s Robert) seethes with patriarchal, philistine indignation at Nora’s action.
“Where’s his Act Four?” he gruffly speculates. “You slammed that door, walked as far as Fortnum and Mason… then crawled back.” All is not quite as straightforward as it first appears, though. The two women know each other more intimately than they’re letting on, and the emotional temperature is taken incredibly high very swiftly, with a harrowing performance from Fishwick as a brittle woman breaking at her inability to join her boho idol in sexual freedom.
That sense of social pressure bearing down on individuals is sustained as we move into 1988. Fresh from watching a Norwegian staging of the play, and flaunting his sexuality in a straight pub, at a time when “gay sex means moral Chernobyl”, Daisy’s gallery-owning gay son Ivar is resolved to be the unrepressed opposite of his detested and unhappy mater, and urges his mother’s carer and his younger (illegal) lover to come out of the closet.
Directing with continual visual panache, Indhu Rubasingham elicits formidable oscillations between gaiety and pain from her cast. After the rectitude of the first scene, Joshua James is near unrecognisable as Ivar, channelling Rik Mayall in his garrulous flamboyance, as Calam Lynch as his companion Eric indulges his crude badinage while squirming in bashful confusion.
The second half? Less assured, more obviously scripted, intellectually accomplished but viscerally weaker. The action shuttles past a genderflipped (sent-up) spin on the Ibsen, with Eric’s daughter (Fishwick again) seeking answers from the man she takes to be Ivar (Richard Cant, another deft role-switcher) and throwing up questions about the freedom or otherwise of today’s same-sex marrieds.
The evening comes full circle – circa 2042 – and ties up another throughthreaded theme, that theatre itself might be a confining doll’s house. Yes, that’s a lot to squeeze in, but for a play to cram in so much, with such élan, obedient to the original while breaking free from it, is frankly inspiring. Until July 6. Tickets: 020 7328 1000; kilntheatre.com