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A Doll's House
By Henrik Ibsen
BAM Harvey Theatre
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
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It’s a real challenge to make a new production of A Doll’s House exciting in 2014. Numerous strong productions have run in New York in recent memory, including news-grabbing events such as a German version at BAM that had Nora shoot Torvald before leaving him, a Mabou Mines version that cast the male roles with 4-foot-tall actors, and a Comden-and-Green Broadway musical sequel called A Doll’s Life. Most regular theatergoers have read or seen the play at least once, so plot surprise is out of the question. Then there’s the problem of creakiness in the feminism: to stress Nora’s shelteredness as an infantilized housewife, as most productions do, is to risk making sophisticated modern urbanites dismiss her as a Victorian irrelevance.
The Young Vic production now running at BAM, directed by Carrie Cracknell, has met this challenge amazingly well, largely because of the actress Hattie Morahan’s wonderfully perceptive and astonishingly nuanced performance as Nora. Morahan’s crucial discovery was that Ibsen’s protagonist isn’t actually naïve, as she claims and as her husband and many spectators presume. Amped up with impish restlessness and girlish friskiness, this Nora is a vain, annoyingly peppy, self-consciously beautiful, virtuosic flirt in the mold of Jackie Kennedy—all of which puts her putative ignorance about business and the larger social world in a fascinatingly self-satisfied light. Morahan’s Nora manipulates men not just because an oppressive patriarchy leaves her no other choice but also because she’s good at it, and likes it. How much more interesting that is than the innocent-victim portrayals we are used to. One listens especially closely to the climactic husband-wife showdown here because this wife doesn’t duck responsibility. Sure, she judges Torvald for his abominable behavior but she judges her own behavior just as severely and now wants to change it.
Set on a dynamic revolving stage designed by Ian MacNeil that keeps everyone off balance and Nora constantly moving from room to room—no one is ever comfortable in one place—this production is certainly the most memorable event at BAM this season. It is crisp, funny and harrowing in all the right ways and should be seen before it leaves town.
