Playing Ibsen for laughs

A Doll’s House
Donmar

The Observer
Cottesloe

Amazing guy, Ibsen. Still scribbling away at the age of 181, the Norwegian genius has teamed up with under-rated Spooks writer Zinnie Harris to create a new version of A Doll’s House. They’ve shifted the setting from 19th-century Norway to London in 1909 and promoted Thomas from the provincial bourgeoisie to parliament. Odd choice. Putting the play at the heart of the British Empire adds not one ounce of dramatic weight, and if Thomas is a leading democratic statesman his unworldly Puritanism seems bizarre and incredible.

The good news is that Harris has helped her co-author discover a knack for comedy he never showed as a solo writer. Numerous ribald Ibsenities have been restored to the script. ‘I’ve got your husband by the testicles,’ snarls Nora’s blackmailer. There are lots of decent jokes in this rewrite but comedy damages the tone and undermines the gradual accretion of suspense and horror that should propel the drama to its final cataclysm. The top-drawer cast have been highly praised by the critics albeit in that strain of vague approbation we use when we baulk at telling the unhappy truth.

Who’s good? Christopher Eccleston has hysterics twice and throws the furniture around. Lots of rage, not much range. Gillian Anderson’s Nora has the stillness and golden autumn beauty of Meryl Streep but there’s a reticence about her, a coolness, a Prozac glaze, which discourages one from leaping up and yelling ‘Yes!!’ when she thumps the door shut on Toby Stephens’s Thomas. Stephens is a bluff, uncomplicated and enormously handsome actor who was born to play comedy bounders. He does the cad wonderfully. He never walks. He sways aggressively forward, halts suddenly, tosses back his head and cocks his chin.