You can never completely destroy Ibsen's masterpiece. But Shared Experience's new production, directed by Polly Teale with Yvonne McDevitt, has a damn good try. It is labelled "expressionistic". What struck me was its mindnumbing literalness. Every-thing that is unspoken in Ibsen's text is acted out as if for an audience of five-year-olds.
It starts with Nora emerging from a real doll's house. Meanwhile the home that she and Torvald inhabit is full of cracked walls presumably to indicate a rotting bourgeois marriage. It gets worse. Every time Nora mentions her father, Pip Donaghy appears dangling a bag of macaroons in front of her as if she were a domestic pet. And, when Nora is haunted by Krogstad's revelation of her forgery, the tattered blackmailer appears on stage writhing at her feet.
The intention is to remind us that Ibsen was not a purely naturalistic dramatist. But whoever supposed that he was? Ibsen himself supplies all the symbolism you need. The tarantella, for instance, represents Nora's repressed demonism so that you don't need, as here, for her to whirl around clutching the doll's house roof.
What you lose, by the intrusion of shadow-characters, is the autonomy of the individual actors. It hinders rather than helps Anne-Marie Duff's Nora for us to be constantly reminded that she has been the victim of domineering men. Her performance comes into its own only when she is left alone with Torvald and confronts him, with unaffected downrightness, with her lifelong dependence. But even in this scene Paterson Joseph's Torvald is so heavy handedly patronising that the crucial point that the play is about his self-realisation as well as Nora's is obscured.
The best work comes from Jude Akuwudike, who overcomes Krogstad's melodramatic writhing to suggest a guilt-handed blackmailer, and from Eileen O'Brien, who makes something unexpectedly moving out of the nurse's revelation that she has farmed out her own illegitmate daughter. A moment that normally goes for nothing is suddenly thrown into sharp relief, which proves that the best way to play Ibsen is to excavate the text, here given in Michael Meyer's excellent translation, rather than to treat is a source of child's picturebook illustration.
Until December 9. Box office: 020-7369 1761.
