Review: A Doll's House 2. The Lace Market Theatre. Nottingham.

A Doll’s House 2 by Lucas Hnath at The Lace Market Theatre follows shortly after their production of A Doll’s House in the Main House. Where one door has dramatically slammed shut another is gently opened upstairs in the studio space. But will there be a welcome in Nora Helmer’s former home?

We discover that 19th Century gentility and polite society manners aren’t going to remain quite so gentle or germane in this modern language production impeccably directed by Micha Darmola. With a strong cast of four peopling the sparsely furnished studio floor space Darmola creates abundant atmospheres through some adroit and brilliant staging. Not one movement seems out of place.

Any flies on these Helmer household walls better watch out as strong words and proverbial fists fly and even the elderly maid Anne Marie (Sue Drew) lets loose more than a few bold expletives born of long held family frustrations. Drew is excellent in this role and gives Anne Marie a solid personality onstage and off. One could easily imagine her maid hidden behind the scenes with a glass against the wall to catch all the fury building up in the living room.

Fifteen years away from the family home Nora (Laura Chambers) returns to the scene of her dramatic door slamming departure. Once an outcast in society with barely a penny in her purse she has developed into a wealthy published writer after penning a successful yet damning book on the nature of love and marriage. Writing under a pseudonym she has courted controversy by cursing the very nature of marriage and the way that men corrupt the love relationship after the initial wooing of the woman is over and the rings are firmly on the fingers. To her, and through her writing, marriage is generally a prison and she predicts that the very idea and practice of marriage will be strongly rejected in twenty to thirty years time.

It doesn’t take a relationship guidance genius to realise that her anti-marriage ideas are heavily inspired by her former marriage to her husband Torvald (James Whitby). It is interesting that in Nora’s confrontational return, imagined by playwright Lucas Hnath, that she doesn’t really want to see or speak with Torvald or her estranged late teenage daughter Emmy (Fiona Bumann). Well , it wouldn’t be much of a drama if she didn’t and the emotional temperatures shoot up to boiling point especially when Nora learns she isn’t actually legally divorced and has even been officially declared dead by many in the society she formerly existed in fifteen plus years previously. Many themes from the Ibsen’s original A Doll’s House play come up such as martial deceit and the nature of forgery and its dangerous implications legally.

The Lace Market Theatre period costumes are exemplary and the top class acting even more so. Chambers imbues her Nora with a delicious mix of initial confidence, anxiety, anger, contemplation and fresh marital frustration. Whitby impresses as Torvald now interpreted as rather a broken figure with more than a hint of a massive stroke about to happen. Together they make a winning and believable team. It’s all in the body language and non-melodramatic facial expressions and perfectly gauged speech volume control. Whitby’s emotions are all about repression and a pathetic attempt to retain control over his ex-wife by exploiting her memory with falsehoods. When the shit hits the fan the audience better duck for cover because Torvald’s inner unhappy bunny is properly explosive.

Fiona Bumann is excellent as the quietly spoken teenage daughter Emmy – initially full of welcome, void of personal animosity and charming in her greeting towards Nora. But it doesn’t take long in plot twisting time for the daughter to become a secretly manipulative creature putting her mother very much on her guard as revelations start to spill from Emmy’s often spiteful mouth.

All in all, we would very much recommend this tense emotional rollercoaster of a play where nothing is as it seems and the hearts and minds of the studio audience collectively hang on a civil outcome for the Helmer family.

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