Everyone is busy giving Ibsen a makeover. Samuel Adamson recently transposed Little Eyolf to Kent in the mid-1950s. Now Zinnie Harris sets Ibsen's most famous domestic drama in 1909 London. The result is not as dumb as the National's Mrs Affleck and at least gets Gillian Anderson back on the stage. But it still feels like a diluted version of a great play.
As ever, we see Nora breaking out of her domestic cage in order to achieve self-determination. But Harris has crucially changed the social context. Nora's husband, Thomas Vaughan, is no longer a bank manager but a newly appointed cabinet minister. Nora has forged a signature on a private loan in order to help her husband recuperate from a mental breakdown rather than, as in Ibsen, a physical illness. Most radically Ibsen's blackmailing lawyer, Krogastad, who advanced Nora the money, has here been turned into Neil Kelman: a disgraced politician who wants Nora to use her influence on her husband to restore his public fortunes.
I presume Harris's intention is raise the dramatic stakes and show the continuing nature of female oppression. The actual result of her tinkering is to make Ibsen's play resemble a dressy melodrama on the lines of Wilde's An Ideal Husband.
By turning a play about domestic politics into one that embraces national reputations, she also undermines Ibsen's co-relation of money and marital power and makes the plot seem implausible: if Kelman is really guilty of fraud, you wonder how on earth he can hope to return to the political arena. And when at one point he cries: "I've screwed the Vaughans," you feel his language is hardly consistent with the period.
If Ibsen's play spasmodically survives, it is because Kfir Yefet's production retains its sexual tension. Anderson's Nora is not exactly a doll-wife but a woman whose hold over her husband is physical and who urges him to congress on the carpet even when the doorbell is ringing. She also toys with her ailing admirer Dr Rank (an incisive Anton Lesser), dangling her black stockings in front of him. But while Anderson captures Nora's dismay at Thomas's refusal to share responsibility for her past actions, she cannot be blamed for the fact that the ending lacks its original impact: by 1909 the concept of the independent woman was not as radical as in 1879.
Within the script's limitations Toby Stephens is excellent as Thomas: overbearing and suitably self-righteous. Tara Fitzgerald, herself a former Nora, is also very good as Christine. And even though I could hardly believe in Kelman as an Edwardian politician, Christopher Eccleston lends him the right anguished aggression. But if you are going to rewrite Ibsen, you need to go the whole hog as Thomas Ostermeier did in his recent Berlin update. Here Harris has simply fiddled around with the original and produced something that is neither flesh, fish, fowl nor pure Ibsen.
