A Doll’s House review – sex, drugs and Romola Garai in a heroic Ibsen update

Who would Henrik Ibsen’s Nora be in 21st-century Britain? Would her husband, Torvald still be a bank manager and she his “little squirrel” housewife? Transposing this drama of 19th-century proto-feminism into the present day is a tricky business, partly because the gendered confinements of Nora and Torvald’s “ideal” middle-class marriage are built on thoroughly old-fashioned values: a husband who prides himself as the sole breadwinner, a wife who would spark social scandal if she left her marital home. Adapter Anya Reiss does a heroic job of reimagining this story for modern times, and half pulls it off. In her version, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, Nora (Romola Garai) is the wife of high-earning London banker, Torvald (Tom Mothersdale), who is also a recovering drug addict. Nora, you sense, is something of a “trophy wife” for him, although far cleverer and more resourceful than he realises. She has secretly bailed the household out of financial ruin and found the money to pay for Torvald’s addiction recovery. They are living an upwardly mobile life – a scatter of white goods and a sprawl of shopping bags on Hyemi Shin’s stage set represent Nora’s pre-Christmas shopping splurge. It is conspicuous consumption built on her lie and his convenient blindness to it. The original drama’s plot cogs are all here: the blackmail that Nora contends with through Torvald’s colleague, Nils Krogstad (James Corrigan), and a visit from her old, needy friend Kristine (Thalissa Teixeira), a penniless woman whose decision to marry for money has backfired, and who initially regards Nora as a spoilt wife, judging from the carefully manicured surface of her life. It is a convincingly updated scenario, with talk of Instagram, money and a stock market rocked by conflict in the Middle East. So the sexual dynamics of Nora and Torvald’s marriage are examined through the crosshairs of class and contemporary capitalism. As an adaptation, it is inspired in its ideas, full of intersectional a…