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Henrik Ibsen, adapted and directed by Lee Breuer

Mabou Mines, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto

January 22-February 4, 2007

Harbourfront’s New World Stage Festival has opened with Mabou Mines DollHouse, a production that already toured the world winning scores of rave reviews.  Famous though director Lee Breuer is, to this jaundiced eye, the show is merely a gimmicky concept production that pointlessly turns Ibsen’s great proto-feminist play of 1879 into an absurdist farce.  Breuer’s one good idea is to set the action in a large dollhouse that Nora has bought for her children.  Otherwise, he seems to mock the play, not illuminate it.  His chief gimmick is to have all the male roles played by actors under four feet tall and all the women played by actors of above-average height.  Thus, Breuer supposes that he satirizes male power.  Unfortunately, he also makes women seem ridiculous in allowing themselves to be dominated by such short people.  The cast’s fake Norwegian accents, Maude Mitchell’s annoying baby voice as Nora and lots of awkward sex and slapstick would make any serious play, not just Ibsen’s, seem foolish. 

The problem is that Breuer’s narrow concept remains static while the Ibsen’s play is dynamic.  It changes characters into caricatures that even the cast’s fine performances can’t save.  By the second act Breuer descends into anything-for-a joke mode involving the stagehands, the piano accompanist, a stilt-walker--anything, it seems, to shift our focus from Ibsen to himself. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2007-02-01.

Photo: Honora Fergusson Neumann as Kristine, Maude Mitchell as Nora, Michael Povinelli as Torvald and Ricardo Gil as Dr. Rank. ©Joan Marcus.