"I've discovered this Christmas that the law is not what I thought… and I can't accept that the law is right. If a woman cannot spare her old dying father… or save her husband's life… that can't be right." Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play about the breakdown of a seemingly happy marriage (in a new adaptation by Bryony Lavery) is drawing to a close. Frauds, debts and deceptions have been revealed; social disaster narrowly averted. Husband and wife face each other across a table for their first-ever serious conversation. Cush Jumbo's Nora pronounces the words with simple, direct clarity. David Sturzaker's Torvald stares at her in bewildered incomprehension. The moment is brief, but its effect is immense – as if the final drop has been added to a saturating solution and the crystals suddenly form, beautiful and geometrically perfect.
In Greg Hersov's understatedly taut production, all the facets of Ibsen's "modern tragedy" arrange themselves around this phrase: "…that can't be right". Every (finely portrayed) character is judged against it. Nora's friends – death-darkened Dr Rank (Jamie de Courcey), almost-embittered Mrs Linde (Kelly Hotten) – and her enemy – corruptly desperate Krogstad (Jack Tarlton) – are revealed as damaged humans: having suffered injustices, they try to manoeuvre through them. Torvald, her husband, blinds himself to compassionate reason: preferring to play the puppet to social expectations, he denies his own humanity. Only Nora is courageous enough to accept the terrible consequence of her newly awakened knowledge of good and evil – exclusion from a corrupt society: she becomes fully human.
Ibsen's play challenges the audience: which of these characters are you? If the ensemble is not strong, this challenge is lost. Here, Hersov's company is rock solid. Nora's brilliance, properly set in its context, is illuminating rather than showy. In Jumbo's magnificent performance, she radiates consciousness. Troubled thoughts shadow her outward vitality, as if the spirit struggling inside her body were actually visible, until the final scene, when spirit and flesh fuse in the consciousness of "that can't be right". For all its period setting (Helen Goddard's design), this is still a challengingly contemporary drama.
On press night the three children were vividly portrayed by Joel Danziger, Raffi Day and Lily Blossom Tait.
