Few 19th-century plays still seem quite as urgent as Ibsen's 1879 drama about a woman who comes to understand that her marriage is a sham. The satisfying slam of that door as Nora turns her back on her self-constructed doll's house in order to discover herself has become a rallying cry through the years, particularly for feminists, and can still be heard loud and clear today. Seldom has bourgeois theatre offered such a startling, radical social message: wives of the world, unite – you have nothing to lose but your department-store account cards.
Theatre Delicatessen's director Frances Loy tries to ensure that we hear the message by updating the story to the present and using an all-female cast so that everyone is contorting themselves. The images briefly glimpsed between acts are of women bound and corseted, as if being groomed to take on a predefined role. But – as other directors have discovered, including Thomas Ostermeier, whose 2004 production had Nora cutting her banker husband down in a hail of bullets – updating the story presents its own difficulties.
Sophie Reynolds's adaptation does little to help by failing to give the dialogue a genuine contemporary edge. While the idea of staging the piece on a catwalk where the characters are constantly on show is a good one, Loy fails to capitalise on its potential to provide a commentary on how in thrall modern women are to self-image.
But the real problem with the updating is that, while the 19th-century Nora represents all middle-class married women, bound by convention and a law that states that she has no rights to act independently, this limp, unsympathetic Nora begins to look like an anomaly in the 21st century. Ibsen's character speaks to us across the years because she is one of millions; Theatre Delicatessen's Nora is one in a million, a woman who thinks that putting the baubles on the Christmas tree counts as a career. Of course, there are footballer's wives and whippet-thin trophy bankers' spouses languishing in Notting Hill doll's houses, but the struggle for most women is not to escape the patriarchy of the home, but to get equality in the workplace so that they can pay their share of the mortgage as well as being perfect wives and mothers.
This might all be more persuasive if the performances were better, but the impression is of decent actors being made to jump through hoops in a well-meaning production that unwittingly diminishes a great play rather than illuminates it.
