FringeReview UK 2026
A Doll’s House
Almeida Theatre
Genre: Adaptation, classical, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre, Translation
Venue: Almeida Theatre, Islington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
How do you twist the most famous door-slam in history in a play nearing 150 years old? Even now, with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in a new, updated version by Anya Reiss, it seems a challenge to modernise what still feels contemporary. It premieres at the Almeida directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins till May 23.
The end, a question-mark, leaves a silence where you might hear a door banging three streets away.
Review
How do you twist the most famous door-slam in history in a play nearing 150 years old? Even now, with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in a new, updated version by Anya Reiss, it seems a challenge to modernise what still feels contemporary. It premieres at the Almeida directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins till May 23. Though closely following the original, many details are smartly added: What’sApp, emails, digitised banking. It allows a switchback of reveals in this riveting two-and-half-hours swerve from the predictable.
It helps that Romola Garai tears through Nora. Throughout she peels back Nora’s learned helplessness and complicity to bleak self-realisation. Garai begins staring at Nora’s Amex-fuelled shopping mountain. Waitrose and Hamley’s bags predominate, occluding Hyemi Shin’s stripped-brick and white set, mercilessly lit by Lee Curran. And perhaps Christmas Trees – this is the second to appear since December – are replacing the iconic Almeida piano. High-powered financier Torvald’s just closing a sale of his company that will bring riches in January. Nora’s just anticipating. Pity there’s an audit due.
Predictably this excess infuriates Torvald -Tom Mothersdale is exasperated and liminally patronising from the off. Though given her anxiety over expenditure, you initially wonder quite why Nora’s done it. Desperation to please mainly, to make up for their last Christmas where Nora funded Torvald’s cocaine-induced heart-attack in a luxury rest home abroad. She knows there’s a hole, which, when she confides she keeps adding the odd £100,000 like a nightmare auction.
Gone are the sickly wheedlings of the original, but in their place a shrewd mix of desire and bargaining around sex and rewards. Garai slinks around, prepared to dance for party strangers and perform sex-acts on her husband. The point where she dresses up in a hideous purple nurse unform for Torvald and mutual friend Petter is a high-point of Nora’s nadir, gyrating to Gareth Fry’s soundtrack.
Nora confides in old university friend Kristine, a poised Talissa Teixeira, bringing sanity and reason like a whirring moral centrifuge. Kristine’s come to ask for help. She’d married for money and security for her mother and child, yet lost out. In a winner’s syndrome blankness, Torvald claims not to remember her. Yet they all remember their mutual friend Nils Krogstad (a seething James Corrigan), jailed for fiddling figures under pressure, and whom Torvald employed but is now sacking. And it’s he, not her dying father who helped Nora finance Torvald’s time out. Later it’s clear Nils has history with Kristine too.
Corrigan doesn’t enter through the entry-phone door like everyone else, but skulks and clambers onstage like a troll. This way it make sense: you could imagine him sneaking round a sash window in a realist set. Corrigan’s rumpled, seedy Nils is visibly a contemporary who didn’t make it in a Torvald-fuelled world.
In contrast with the lighter loose-fitting clothes of the successful, Alex Lowde’s costumes darken to browns and blacks for Corrigan and Teixeira. Corrigan makes of Nils a man wronged and wrung-out to dry by the winner-takes system Torvald lives by. And his path doesn’t lead inexorably down: there’s a shaft of redemption. Likewise Teixeira’s Kristine has made pragmatic decisions that don’t work out: and Nora has to wake up to a dark mirror.
Garai’s Nora continually flicks to a new level of both consciousness and complicity. Though her awakening is more of the nature of Torvald’s world than her own agency as a woman. Except manipulating her own sexual objectification.
Costumes though are a richer black for Oliver Huband’s Petter Rank. A doctor in love with Nora but terminally ill, he’s terminally flirty too: his love has become a joke between all three. Petter’s playful desperation though hides a gleam of hope that there’s something between him and Nora beyond the love of a friend. Can she confide in him, perhaps more? Huband’s party-animal-on-the-edge is darkly radiant, a clown with (as he says) a black cross signal for farewell.
Yet it’s the get-out-of political card – as literally bang-up-to-date as you could imagine – that paradoxically alerts Nora. It’s not just the personal that mires her and Torvald. Overtly anti-capitalist, this version skewers Torvald not so much as a controlling husband, though that’s there: it condemns his whooping at misfortunes that make him rich. Nevertheless, this Nora is responding to his politics in part. The personal might become political though not enough of the personal is left behind.
Garai though scorches through Nora’s reinvented trophy-wife, sassier than Nora’s original, as befits any educated person living through the 21st century. “I don’t think I’ve understood anything until now,” Nora states as Torvald whoops to the news. And more reflectively, her valedictory speech: “No I loved you an awful lot. And… the versions of us, I’ve a lot of affection for. But they aren’t standing here right now.” Some of the feminist impact though is recessed. As is the final iconic gesture. And we miss it. Garai’s is an outstanding performance however in a superb cast. One where Mothersdale’s Torvald emerges as more volatile, vulnerable and, despite his complicity in suffering, allowed a sliver of self-understanding and potential ace.
Yet entryphones and monitors render things more immediate. The end, a question-mark, leaves a silence where you might hear a door banging three streets away.
Collaborating Director Jenny Ogilvie, Casting Director Amy Ball CDG, Costume Supervisor Christina Tomei, Assistant Director Philippe Cato, Photo Credit Marc Brenner.
