A DOLL'S HOUSE Review: WHEN NORA SLAMS THE DOOR ON MEANING

ANYA REISS' MODERN UPDATE DRAINS IBSEN'S HEROINE OF HER RADICAL FORCE, LEAVING ROMOLA GARAI STRANDED IN A CURIOUSLY AIRLESS REVIVAL

★★☆☆☆

There is something faintly perverse about encountering a play as historically incendiary as A Doll’s House and feeling, above all else, unmoved. Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama was once a theatrical detonation — a work that rattled the moral architecture of its time with the simple, shocking proposition that a woman might choose herself over her prescribed role as wife and mother. Nearly a century and a half later, the challenge for any revival is not simply to modernize the setting, but to preserve — or reinterpret — that core provocation.

In Anya Reiss’s new adaptation at the Almeida Theatre, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbons, the play is transported to present-day London, where Nora and Torvald are no longer stiff representatives of 19th-century domesticity but an upwardly mobile couple in their late 30s or early 40s, newly installed in an elegant home and on the cusp of a financial windfall. On paper, it’s a promising shift — one that could illuminate the subtler, more insidious pressures of modern marriage, money, and image.

But what unfolds instead is a strangely flattened reimagining, one that confuses contemporary relevance with mere topical updating. The mechanics of Nora’s secret — once a desperate, illicit loan taken in a society that denied women financial agency — are here recast as outright financial fraud: a brazen transfer of £860,000 from a client account into her family’s own. It is a change that raises the stakes legally, but paradoxically diminishes them dramatically.

In Henrik Ibsen’s original conception, Nora’s deception is both morally fraught and deeply sympathetic, born of love and necessity within a system stacked against her. Here, her actions feel less like an act of constrained rebellion and more like reckless entitlement — a misjudgment so severe that it distances her from the audience rather than drawing us into her inner life. The result is a protagonist who appears neither tragically trapped nor frustratingly naïve.

This recalibration has profound consequences for the play’s emotional and ideological center. Nora’s famous departure — that door slam which echoed across theatrical history — lands with a dull thud. In this version, her decision to leave her husband and, more troublingly, her two very young children, reads not as a radical assertion of selfhood but as an abdication of responsibility. What once felt like the birth of a new consciousness now suggests, uncomfortably, a retreat.

Reiss’s Nora is not the architect of a fragile illusion, carefully maintained under societal duress, but rather a figure scrambling to escape the fallout of her own catastrophic mistake. The distinction is crucial, and it robs the play of its enduring feminist charge. One is left wondering what, exactly, this Nora represents in a contemporary context — and why her story should still matter.

Gibbons’s production does little to clarify matters. Staged largely in the basement of the family’s home — a sleek but curiously anonymous design by Hyemi Shin — the action unfolds in a muted visual register that mirrors the adaptation’s emotional inertia. Scenes drift rather than build; confrontations arrive without sufficient tension; and the play’s climactic unraveling feels less like an explosion than a slow leak.

If the evening holds together at all, it is largely due to Romola Garai, an Olivier Award-winning performer of considerable intelligence and sensitivity. Her Nora is finely detailed, particularly in moments of mounting panic, where flashes of desperation pierce through the script’s limitations. There is a compelling fragility in her performance, a sense of a mind fraying under pressure.

And yet, even Garai cannot fully transcend the confines of the role as written. She has spoken of Nora as a dream part — and one senses her reaching for its complexity — but this adaptation offers a diminished canvas. Her final scenes, though emotionally committed, cannot quite restore the moral and psychological weight that has been stripped away.

None of this is to suggest that Anya Reiss’s instincts are misguided. The impulse to revisit and reinterpret canonical works is not only valid but necessary. But modernization requires more than updated technology, contemporary dialogue, or a shift in setting; it demands a rethinking that deepens, rather than dilutes, the original’s central tensions.

Here, the opposite has occurred. In attempting to make Nora’s story more immediately relatable, the production inadvertently renders it less coherent, less urgent, and ultimately less affecting.

There have been countless adaptations of A Doll’s House over the years — many of them bold, some of them revelatory. This one, regrettably, feels neither. It is not offensive so much as inert: a version that moves, speaks, and gestures like a modern play, but rarely convinces us that it understands the one it is trying to become.

For all its polished surfaces and capable performances, this Doll’s House stands curiously empty. And when the door finally closes, it leaves behind not shock, or even sorrow, but a lingering sense of something essential having been lost.

A Doll's House - Almeida Theatre

Attended on 14 April 2026