This is a sensible, sensitive and spirited version of Ibsen's A Doll’s House at the Young Vic, writes Dominic Cavendish.

A Doll's House, Young Vic, review

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Hattie Morahan as Nora, with Susannah Wise as Kristine, in A Doll's House at the Young Vic theatre Photo: Alastair Muir

By Dominic Cavendish

4:59PM BST 10 Jul 2012

After a spate of work in which Simon Stephens has appeared determined to thrust himself forward as experimental theatre’s ageing enfant terrible – most recently with the critically divisive Three Kingdoms at the Lyric, Hammersmith – it’s a welcome surprise to find him playing it almost as safe as houses with Ibsen.

The Stockport playwright gives us a sensible, sensitive and spirited version of A Doll’s House at the Young Vic that chimes with the debt-laden times we’re trapped in and poses still-pressing questions about male-female relations in marriage, the rights of women and the responsibilities of motherhood along with broader provocations about the moral atrophy that can underlie material affluence. Yet neither he nor the rest of the creative team hanker after crude modishness.

Hattie Morahan’s wonderfully luminous and sinuous Nora isn’t required to strap on a dildo or reach for a kitchen-knife in pursuit of some radical point. Instead, in Carrie Cracknell’s fantastically assured production, which gives the 19th-century Norwegian action an airy, suburban flavour, this banker’s wife is a conventional creature in stylish ankle-length dress brought to the precipice of an impossible choice one crisis-wracked Christmas: does she stay stuck in a half-life of submission to a husband who forfeits her love and respect with his gross ingratitude, or leave to “find herself”, thereby abandoning her children?

Loyally serving Ibsen’s stark vision, Cracknell emphasises what’s at stake by briefly introducing a (real-life) eight-month-old baby into the cosy family scene. Wouldn’t you have to be a monster to walk out on an infant that vulnerable? Not, maybe, if you’re caught on the horns of a tragic dilemma. Just as Iain MacNeil’s exquisite set revolves the rooms of the Helmer household, as though on a carousel, multiplying the sense of furtive intrigue and lurking despair, so the evening puts Morahan’s Nora in a vertiginous spin. She begins on a note of brittle assurance, sneaking chocolates like a naughty-flirty school-girl, and ends up like a bird in fluttering free-fall through stormy air-currents, even her voice a ragged, tattered thing. It’s very much Morahan’s night, but, within the parameters of their characters’ blinkered period masculinity, Dominic Rowan, as her upright, uptight husband Torvald, too proudly possessive by half, Nick Fletcher as the blackmailing clerk Krogstad, flashing flick-knife smiles, and Steve Toussaint as the kindly, terminally ill Doctor Rank ensure that this fleet-footed, three-hour affair builds to a satisfying peak of tension, recrimination and financially-induced personal meltdown. Warmly recommended.

Tickets: 020 7922 2922

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