Jemima Levick’s Doll’s House is a paean to style, writes Joy Watters. The Rep’s associate director has taken Henrik Ibsen’s groundbreaking work of 1879 and updated it to the 1950s, drawing a parallel between the two periods and the barriers that women had to break through and the attitudes they had to combat in a male-dominated society.
Levick has acknowledged her debt to TV series Mad Men in creating her production; the look is the same and there are echoes in the characters of both, but Ibsen’s Nora is a woman who does the unthinkable for a middle class wife of any era she leaves her husband and her children.
Alex Lowde’s design shows a section of the house, a clean-cut Scandinavian empty soulless interior echoing the empty marriage of Nora and husband Torvald.
Levick has not shifted the piece to the US although there is a touch of Americana in the background music and Emily Winter’s accent from time to time goes Stateside.
It is not particularly rooted in any place and at times there is a sense that the look of the piece dominates to the detriment of the drama the shock of the new is obscured by style.
Winter takes on the challenge of Nora with brio, looking great and bouncing around like a puppy. For Nora is an extremely irritating character the daddy’s girl who has become a child-wife never really touching reality.
Her downfall is secretly borrowing money, forging her father’s signature, to support her husband in illness. She does not tell her husband, complicit in the belief that men must feel they control everything.
Where Winter’s performance breaks down is when Nora’s secret comes out and her husband is revealed in his true colours, not the big strong father figure she believed in.
Nora’s epiphany is sudden and her unforeseen wisdom a shock. Winter does not fully capture that seismic change.
Neil McKinven manfully conveys Torvald, playing with his little wife in his spare moments while concentrating on business. The examination of the differing lives of men and women is delineated in the supporting roles of Kristine (Irene Macdougall) and Dr Rank (Robert Paterson), both actors bringing great clarity.
Photo Douglas Robertson/Dundee Rep.A Doll’s House is at Dundee Rep until November 6. See www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk for more.