John Osborne's Look Back in Anger borrowed from Ibsen's A Doll's House in Jimmy and Alison's erotic game of "squirrels and bears". The baby talk is ratcheted up in Bryony Lavery's newish version of the 19th-century classic, first seen at Birmingham Rep but better served here by Library Theatre director Chris Honer. Ken Bradshaw's Torvald barely seems to know his wife's name, instead smothering her with endearments and referring to her as a "little bird", one imprisoned in a feathered nest of both his and her own making.
The most shocking moment is not the revelation of how Nora, unable by law to borrow without father or spouse's permission, came by the loan she needed to save her husband's life, nor that famous final slamming of the door. It's when Tovald asks his wife if she has been happy in their eight years of marriage and she replies that she has merely been "cheerful". Many modern women will recognise that bright, busy cheerfulness.
Lavery's version, with its use of modern vernacular (Nora looks forward to having "pots of money"; the dying Dr Rank talks about being "liquidated") tries hard to ease the drama into the 21st century, while recognising that it is very much of its time. If there is sometimes a tension between script and production, it is generally a healthy one, apart from poor Emma Cunniffe's hideous frocks that belie Nora's assertion that she looks good in anything. Cunniffe is a strong, direct Nora if not a moving one, and you wonder how this thoughtful woman threw in her lot with the infantalising Torvald, played with an interesting edge of erotic need. There's good support from Paul Barnhill as an unusually sympathetic Krogstad and Sarah Ball as the uptight, upright, Mrs Linde. Not a revelatory evening, but a solid one.
