ajhlovestheatre

A DOLL’S HOUSE

by Henrik Ibsen

in a new version by Anya Reiss

directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins

Almeida Theatre, London – until 23 May 2026

running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval

https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/a-dolls-house-play/

Auteur Simon Stone turned Yerma and Phaedra into effectively new plays with, respectively, Billie Piper at the Young Vic and Janet McTeer at the National, or Duncan MacMillan and Thomas Ostermeier modernised Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People with Matt Smith for the West End in 2024 and then for last year’s Barbican Seagull with Cate Blanchett. Similarly,  this new Almeida A Doll’s House is more a riff on a classic than a straightforward revival. Playwright Anya Reiss (and it’s really her Doll’s House as much as it’s Ibsen’s) and director Joe Hill-Gibbins have both got form in casting canonical texts in a refreshing contemporary light, and they’ve both really gone for it here, with largely pleasing results.

Not every aspect of Ibsen’s study of feminist worm-turning in a marriage compromised by chauvinism, deceit and financial controversies, lends itself to an update that sees controlling husband Torvald remade as a rambunctious City boy and flighty Nora as his spendthrift trophy wife. As embodied by an entrancing but raw and anguished Romola Garai, this Nora comes across as a particularly strung-out version of the kind of Islington ‘yummy mummy’ one might expect to see in the Almeida audience. But where Ibsen’s heroine forges her father’s signature to secure money for her spouse’s medical treatment, this one has somehow managed to embezzle over £800,000 from some of Torvald’s business clients to pay for his substance abuse rehab. 

The bang up-to-date treatment renders similarly implausible that a woman with as much personal gravitas as Thalissa Teixera’s superb Kristine, who in this version had been at University with Nora, Torvald and the blackmailing Nils Krogstad, would wind up as an impecunious, glorified babysitter dependent on Torvald for her next career progression. These are areas where Reiss seems constricted by the original Ibsen, but when she allows herself the space and freedom to move more into her own territory, the play becomes really engrossing. Everybody swears their heads off (the words “fuck” or “fucking” are used so often, even in the middle of sentences, that we quickly become inured to them), and nobody except Kristine is particularly likeable. 

I’m not sure that matters though: Reiss isnt trying to sell these people to us, and neither is Hill-Gibbins’ uniformly strong cast. Collectively, they’re painting here an accurate but unsympathetic picture of modern urban dwellers in love equally with the sounds of their own voices and the moneyed shallowness of their existence. In moments of high stress and tension, or uncertainty, Hill-Gibbins has them on the floor on all fours like caged zoo animals. Hyemi Shin’s set, while suggestive of the basement of an affluent home that’s still being worked in, also has the sense of an arena, or possibly a bear-baiting pit. 

The shorter second half is more satisfying, but also more distressing, than the first, as the situations Ibsen and Reiss have set up play out with horribly compulsive results. When Torvald’s mask of patronising, self-assured masculinity slips as he learns what Nora has done, the torrent of verbal abuse he unleashes upon her is deeply unpleasant but makes for riveting theatre. Mothersdale and Garai play it like the brilliant creatures of the theatre that they are, entirely without vanity, him a howling, threatening bully, as she physically reacts to his rage as though the blows were physical rather than verbal. 

Torvald’s transformation from truculent sexist git you wouldn’t want to sit next to at a dinner party to full blown monster, is completed by a deux ex machina plot invention by Reiss that could have been ripped out of present day newspaper headlines. In another departure from the original, Nora has the tables turned back on her in an act of cruel manipulation that alters the ending of the play. This will undoubtedly divide people but it entirely worked for me.

James Corrigan nails the sweaty desperation and sardonic misery of Nils, whose difficult circumstances are forcing him into using the information he has on Nora’s shady financial activities. Olivier Huband brings warmth and louche charisma to the doctor whose romantic/sexual connections to Nora are more explicit here than usual. Costume designer Alex Lowde dresses everybody in grungily expensive attire that feels perfectly appropriate for these people at this time, and gives Garai a spangled, titillating nurses outfit and lurid porno wig for the offstage party where things start to come to a head. Lee Curran’s lighting bathes everything in queasily expressive, unforgiving washes, relieved only by the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, a sole source of comfort in amongst the moneyed starkness.

This is an ambitious reimagining. Ibsen lit the touch paper then Reiss and Hill-Gibbins poured the gasoline on this ultra-modern conflagration of sexual politics, cruelty, treachery and misplaced love. It’s very much a Doll’s House for now and it’s likely to provoke strong reactions. Ultimately, I was pinned to the back of my seat by the power of it.