Review: A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2, Donmar Warehouse

Fifteen years after she walked out on her children, husband and nanny, and without so much as a postcard in-between, Nora walks back through Ibsen's famous door and the comfortable lies families tell each other in order to get through the day begin to unravel. She wants the divorce (that she conveniently assumed she already had) to be legally certified, but it's the 19th century and that is no easy objective for a wife if the husband refuses to play ball. Nora has options to get where she needs to be, but none are straightforward, all will cause pain and each requires a careful negotiation and accompanying subtefuge.

Lucas Hnath's play is five years old now, appearing in the West End for the first time in James Macdonald's snappy 100 minutes all-through production. There are times when it feels a little dated (such is the speed of cultural change in those 60 months or so) - the 21st century language infiltrating the script feels a bit too Hamilton, the stakes attached to these first world problems seem a little overstated, the privilege on display sometimes drowns out the arguments.

Ah, the arguments - there are a lot of those. Few are of the shouty, soapy kind (indeed, it's a complaint of Nora that her husband, Torvald, gaslighted her by never losing his cool, all the better to control the discourse) and most are wordy dialogues with fewer jokes than Noel Coward would insert, but more bite. Much of it boils down to Diane Keaton's pithy observation at the end of Sleeper, " You see, there's a chemical in our bodies that makes it so that we all get on each other's nerves sooner or later."

Nora's solution was to walk out, pull herself up by the bootstraps, make a successful career as a writer, own her home and take and discard lovers as the mood found her. It's a blissful state now threatened by her old, yet actually also current, identity being uncovered. Torvald's solution was to let people think Nora was dead, wasted away in a sanatorium; nanny, Ann Marie, transferred her energies to raising Nora's abandoned sons and daughter; and Emmy, the daughter in question? Well, she worked a few things out for herself. With a bit of shoehorned, somewhat implausible, plotting, everyone has skin in the game of "What happens next?"

Noma Dumezweni gives us a Nora proud of the world she has made for herself - she wouldn't be dressed like a provincial aristocrat were she not - but utterly frustrated that she cannot bend the world to her needs one last time. This is the product of the power imbalance baked into the divorce laws - but could so calculating and thorough a stortyteller as herself have left so damaging a loose end in the narrative of her own life? Dumezweni invests just enough vulnerability in Nora's carapace of badass confidence to suggest that she might.

Brían F. O'Byrne is all bottled up fury as Torvald, initially refusing even to acknowledge that his wife has risen from the metaphorical tomb to which he condemned her, then unable to see that his vision of what makes a good husband was an intolerable stifling of Nora's hopes for a life that was playing out with grim inevitability. Like many a decent bloke, he assumes victimhood, even as he knows he can't really sustain that conceit, the world always stacked in his favour.

June Watson excels as Anne Marie, earthy, comic and a fulcrum of common sense around which the ever-more convoluted answers to Nora's dilemma revolve. Her important speech about the choices she never had provides a useful counterpoint to the upper-middle class travails on show, even if it feels (as a fair bit does) that it's inserted to advance the politics rather than the drama.

Patricia Alliison's Emmy is Hnath's creation. only a walk-on part in Ibsen's source material. Now grown up, she has perfected the wry smile that weighs up her interlocuter, the piercing insight that allows her to plot the route to what best benefits Emmy and the charm to disarm objections. Best of all, she shows Nora that her puffed-up arrogance as the only woman in the world who can see it for what it is and who possesses the cojones to do something about it, may not be the case after all.

Amidst this dense discussion (I'm not sure that real people speechify quite as much as this, but, if they do, it'll be on the subject of marital relations) one oscillates between thinking that one is eavesdropping on a particularly smug Hampstead dinner party and thinking that it's about time husbands and wives spoke as freely as this about the unhappiness that so often gets buried only to explode in acrimonious legal exchanges.

Perhaps there's another sequel too, a ruse I once saw done with Medea - a play that gives the children their voices, not just as Emmy has here as a smart cookie with a clever compromise, but as the collateral damage when their parents become the different people that Nora asserts they are as they get older - but people with the same responsibilities they had when the children were born.

A Doll's House, Part 2 is at The Donmar Warehouse until 6 August.

Photo: Marc Brenner

 

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