Belgrade, Coventry
Torvald, an obnoxiously smug Scandinavian banker, has a large illuminated fish-tank as the focal point of his tastefully minimalist apartment. He also keeps a trophy wife who skips round the strange, cuboid furnishings with a kind of manic, manufactured glee that suggests she has rather less freedom of movement than the fish.
Nora is a 90-minute reduction of Ibsen's A Doll's House made by Ingmar Bergman in 1981. It was originally conceived as a stage trilogy exploring the gender war alongside Bergman's reworking of Strindberg's Miss Julie and his own Scenes from a Marriage.
Ibsen's play concluded, famously, with the door slam that reverberated around the world, yet the play's credibility relies on carefully measured narrative development. It also requires an understanding of its 19th-century context in which it is unthinkable for a woman to run up debts without the knowledge of her husband. Bergman's version is short and sharp, but it reduces the shock, creating a series of thin, melodramatic flashpoints that lack the subtle fibre of truth. A troubling disconnect afflicts Patricia Benecke's production: Sanchia McCormack's Christine has dressed as if for an interview with a temping agency, but announces that she has arrived by steamer. The hand-delivery of letters feels awkward, especially as David Michaels receives the news that he has been ruined, then reprieved, with the swiftness of consecutive emails. And there is some risible nudity that steers everything further towards daytime soap territory.
Penny Layden's performance as Nora is appreciably committed, yet the role, in its denuded state, contrives to be simultaneously under-motivated and over-explicit. Her announcement that the world can "kiss my arse" rings especially hollow – Ibsen's Nora said it far better by not saying it at all.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/feb/02/nora-belgrade-theatre-review
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