Review: A DOLL'S HOUSE, Almeida Theatre

A question. Why would you stay in a room with precisely the kind of people you go out of your way to avoid, as they shout and swear while taking a hammer to something you actually do like? Well, one answer is that you’re in a theatre for a reimaginging of a classic play and it’s not really the done thing to up and go as your ears take another mauling.

That was my fate at the Almeida Theatre, as a glorious summer’s day in London gave way to an evening of Scandinavian gloom. Except, aside from the names (inexplicably retained) and the rough shape of Ibsen’s 1879 drama, this feels like a very London play. Adapter, Anya Reiss and director, Joe Hill-Gibbins, update the Norwegian's text with swear words (the baddest ones too!!!) and Ubers that turn up within two minutes on Christmas Eve, Far from making the play relevant for 2026, it reminded me more of the satires of Yuppie culture that Channel Four rejoiced in back in the 80s. But this is no Serious Money. 

We open on a stage strewn with Christmas shopping - yellow Selfridges bags, Hamleys plastic carriers and Waitrose’s green status symbols - with Nora exulting in the fact that this Christmas will be better than the last. She’s maxed out the Amex (not sure how she retained her credit rating through years of relative penury, but still) in anticipation of her husband, Torvald’s, sale of his company, which is in the last knockings of compliance checking. Nora is at least as excited with this seasonal excess as the kids, kept upstairs and unseen, a decision that limits the pathos that usually clings to the play.

This new dawn is suddenly occluded by clouds, first in the form of Kristine, an old university friend (everyone here seems to think those fleeting undergraduate alliances should last a lifetime) who needs a job and then Nils who soon needs one too, as Torvald hands over his position to Kristine. But Nils has a card to play - the £860k he shifted from one account to another at Nora’s behest so Torvald could do six months secret rehab in Portugal, prior to re-establishing himself in The City. And the money man, envious of the millions in the pipeline flowing into the house, is set on extracting his pound of flesh.

Like me, you might be wondering why this wasn’t all done with that strange cryptocurrency we keep hearing about with its glacially evolving regulatory regime, but Sherman McCoy could have pulled off this heist, its conception and execution very old school. And heist it was, something that Nora tries to deny to herself, but, when she realises what the discovery of her subterfuge will bring, the vision of her brave new world starts to crumble like a Christmas cake left out in the rain.

Romola Garai is irritating as Nora, which is part of her character’s continual childish retreats from the responsibilities her actions have loaded upon her. Tossing long blonde hair and dressed in an Ann Summers nurses costume for the fancy dress party, I never quite believed in the sexpot routine she used in order to keep dragging Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) back from his laptop and in teasing the couple’s Best Friend, the dying doctor Rank (Olivier Huband doing what he can with an underwritten role). 

I suspect we were invited to consider offstage coke-fuelled urban threesomes and clandestine Only Fans accounts (Nora had been doing some unspecified work to pay off her debt). It was all so gauche that, in the second act, I could only think of Truly Scrumptious “turning around on a music box that's wound by a key”, which undercut the vibe somewhat. 

Thalissa Teixiera also has a tricky hand to play with Nora’s friend, Kristine, who seems to be largely a device to ease Nils out of a job. It's surprising that Torvald seems oblivious to the fact that such a change in personnel, on Christmas Eve no less, might not be a tactically wise move with forensic accountants crawling all over the accounts.

The drama improves whenever James Corrigan’s Nils appears. How he materialises in the basement without using its door (he walks through the stalls in the theatre) is unexplained, but his sense of grievance and his desperation to leverage the only power he has to protect his and his kids’ lives, feels very real. It’s somewhat ironic that the manipulative villain of the piece elicits the most empathy, but the wealthy are getting harder and harder to like, so his disdain for Nora and Torvald certainly resonated with me.

There’s time, after a lot of soap opera style shouting, for a new ending with a few barbs thrown at disaster capitalists' warped morality. Stepping over the homeless while walking past the Upper Street estate agents’ windows, it’s easy to see why a skewering of 2020s socio-economic policies is much needed. Just not this one.

A Doll's House at the Almeida Theatre until 23 May

Photo images: Marc Brenner