Review: A Doll’s House, Almeida ***

REVIEW: A MODERN IMAGINING OF THE DOLL’S HOUSE AT THE ALMEIDA

When Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House premiered in Copenhagen in December 1879, the doors that Nora slammed on her way out of the confinement of her marriage shook the whole of Europe, provoking outrage, protests and immediate rewrites. In one notorious German production, the ending was softened so that Nora stays. Ibsen himself called this, “a barbaric outrage.”

Anya Reiss‘s new version for the Almeida, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, asks a reasonable and interesting question: what does Nora’s cage look like in 2026? The answer it arrives at is, in some respects, genuinely thoughtful, and in others, rather troublesome.

The most significant shift is in the nature of Nora’s entrapment. Where Ibsen’s heroine is hemmed in by the entire social architecture of the Victorian era: expectations so pervasive and so crushing that every woman in the audience might recognise herself in her this. Nora’s predicament is, at least in part, of her own construction. Her attachment to a luxurious lifestyle is presented as a driving force, which changes the emotional temperature considerably.

Torvald, meanwhile, has been reimagined as a man in recovery from addiction rather than simply unwell, a choice that carries its own freight of personal judgement. Addiction is a serious and sympathetic subject, but it is not a neutral one, and an audience may find it harder to hold him and Nora in the same steady moral gaze that Ibsen’s original demands.

And then there is the ending. To alter it at all, given how fiercely Ibsen defended it, requires extraordinary courage and a very convincing case. That case is not quite made here, and it softens the production at the very moment it most needs to be brave, depriving us of the most famous door slam in history.

There are real pleasures though. Romola Garai is simply superb. She gives Nora a coiled, trembling interiority, a woman vibrating with pent-up frustration and self-knowledge, and it is a performance of genuine depth and intelligence. She alone makes the evening worth the journey, and then some.

Hyemi Shin‘s set is a large, carpeted, generously lit basement space that speaks of wealth through scale alone and gives the cast room to move in ways that are at times athletic and sensual and surprising. Nora’s dance is genuinely funny, though one does find oneself wondering whether a husband so determined to project seriousness would truly permit something quite so risqué.

The modern staging details ( WhatsApps, laptops, phones) work rather well. Communication, and the gap between what is said and what is meant, is precisely what this play is about, and these feel like a natural vocabulary rather than a gimmick.

The tone, however, is relentless. The swearing, the drinking, the drug-taking are deployed at such consistent volume throughout that they gradually lose their power to disturb. Any dramatic device, however strong, needs contrast to land with force, and when every scene reaches for the same pitch, individual moments begin to blur. There are also moments when the sheer domestic chaos on display strains credulity. One finds oneself wondering where the neighbours are and why they have not rescued the children. The resolution of the financial crisis also felt implausible.

A Doll’s House at its outset left audiences shaken and unsettled. This version leaves you at a slight distance. But Garai’s performance is reason enough to go, and the production, for all its unevenness, is always alive on stage.