Murray Bramwell

Nora
(Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House)
Schaubuhne am Lehniner Plaz, Berlin
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide
March 11. Tickets $85 – $20. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 17.

It has been said that when Nora Helmer slams the door behind her in the final scene of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, its echo could be heard for the rest of the nineteenth century. Thomas Ostermeier’s inventive and incisive re-staging for Berlin’s Schaubuhne company is proof that the play still resonates strongly more than 125 years later.

Unlike the usual stagings of Ibsen’s work in period style, Jan Pappelbaum’s design has Nora set in a Berlin unit, reminding us, with its contemporary trappings – as Ibsen did to his own audience – that we are looking at ourselves.
Immediately, the characters lose their 19th century fustiness and take on unexpected familiarity. Torvald is an overworked bank exec, Krogstad, a middle management casualty, Kristine Linde is no longer a spinster, just unattached, and Rank, is young, debauched and wretched. Nora, too, is recognizable – as the trophy wife who is majoring in shopping.

There is so much to relish in this splendid production. The multilevelled set, dominated by a huge aquarium, is bathed in Erich Schneider’s luxurious lighting as the actors perform with cinematic understatement, the surtitles actually rescuing them from an obligation to over-project. But this apparently seamless naturalism is periodically ruptured by Ostermeier’s hypermanic bursts of strobe und punk. They don’t always work, but the frenetic light-sabre dance that replaces Nora ‘s tarantella and ends with her dunked in the fish tank, has, like the grim slapstick of the drunk and dying Rank, a desperation and melancholy that is heart-breaking.

The performances are remarkable – Jorg Hartmann’s Torvald is both bland and all-controlling, Kay Bartholomaus Schulze shows Krogstad the troll and the abject penitent, while Lars Eidinger’s Rank, complete with costume angel wings, is a study in futile regret. Anne Tismer’s Nora moves from penthouse pet to unfolding panic – with nothing to bargain with but her own body, she is disintegrating before our eyes, a desperate housewife for our time, every bit as much as Ibsen’s.

Ostermeier raises the stakes with his new ending for the play but I am not sure that it is necessary. Having so brilliantly revealed the deep truths behind the life-lies in Ibsen’s text, he shows us that even though a woman can now sign her own chequebook, it is not an end to the matter. Nora here, just as in 1879, leaves everything behind – husband, child, sanctioned identity. In this production, for the first time, we see her on the other side of that infamous door – and she sure isn’t whistling Dixie.

“Desperate housewife transcends the ages”
The Australian, March 13, 2006, p.16.