Review - A Doll's House - Soulpepper Theatre Company, Toronto

✭✭✩✩✩

by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Frank McGuinness, directed by Daniel Brooks

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

July 27-August 27, 2016

Torvald to Nora: “Stop all this play-acting”

Toronto has not seen a good production of A Doll’s House since DVxT’s production in 2000. Now that Soulpepper has unveiled its new production of the Ibsen’s classic, that statement, sadly, is still true. The Soulpepper production suffers from serious miscasting of the central role of Nora exacerbated by misguided elements of design and direction. Soulpepper’s previous encounters with Ibsen have produced a goodish version of Ghosts in 2011, a terrible version of John Gabriel Borkman in 2007 and a superb version of The Wild Duck in 2005. It’s too bad that this Doll’s House will have to be set down in the minus column.

Though it dates from 1879, A Doll’s House is one of the foundational plays of modern drama both because it reimagines drama in a bourgeois rather than regal setting and because it makes women’s rights its central concern. Ibsen exposes the tendency in men to to infantilize and objectify women in how the bank manager Torvald (Christopher Morris) patronizingly treats his wife Nora (Katherine Gauthier). Nora, who has both a maid and a nanny for her two children, literally has nothing to do except shop, and even that is a habit for which Torvald chides her.

Nora’s incurious view of the world is upset when Mrs. Linde (Oyin Oladejo), an old friend of hers comes to visit hoping that Torvald will give her a job. The ideas of being independent of a man and working for oneself have never previously occurred to Nora. Nora’s main source of pride is that she feels she secretly saved Torvald’s life by paying for a healing trip to Italy without his knowing it. Nora did so, however, by taking out a loan from Krogstad (Damien Atkins), an employee of Torvald’s, who when Torvald fires him threatens to expose Nora’s secret, and worse, that she obtained the loan by forging her father’s signature.

Ibsen’s plays have been successfully updated to the present, most notably the Tarragon’s production of An Enemy of the People in 2014 and 2015. Updating A Doll’s House to the present, as director Daniel Brooks does, brings with it many problems. First of all, to have a present-day Nora be unaware of the possibilities of individual freedom and fulfilment in work makes her look incredibly stupid.

The fact that she is so happy to live off her husband’s rising earnings and do nothing else makes her look shallow rather than acting, as it would have done in Ibsen’s time, as a critique of societal expectations of wives. The modern setting also makes Mrs. Linde’s independence seem normal rather than daring as it is should be.

Much of the tension in the play hinges on Krogstad’s incriminating letter that is locked in the house letter box. This is also a play where people use the maid to take letters to other people in town. When Brooks has Torvald play the music for a tarantella on his smartphone, he immediately demolishes the need in the plot for people to receive physical messages rather than phone calls or texts.

Beyond difficulties with updating the play, Brooks’s direction is simply sloppy. There are four openings to Lorenzo Savoini’s stark set. In the course of the evening Books uses all four as exits to the “front” of the house even if they previously have been identified with Torvald’s study or the entrance to the bedrooms. Brooks had Mrs. Lind exit stage right (to the bedrooms) to fix Nora’s costume but later enter from stage left (from Torvald’s study) when she has finished.

The “action” of Ibsen’s plays consists of long conversations usually between only two people. Master directors are able to find natural excuses for the characters to change where they sit to lend movement to these scenes. Brooks, however, has characters constantly changing seats with little or no motivation, often moving farther away when they should be moving closer, as if they were playing musical chairs.

Among Brooks’s hodgepodge of ideas is having cast members make their entrances in slow motion and in dim light, only to resume regular animation when the lights go up. If this is an attempt to give the play a dream-like aura, it fails since non-realistic staging never seeps into the play itself.

To top all this off, Brooks gives Torvald a scene of gratuitous nudity near the end. Brooks wants to reveal that after treating Nora like a child, Torvald without her acts just like a baby without its toy. The problem is that Torvald has been shown to be so obsessively fastidious about etiquette and propriety that it is completely out of character for him to take off his clothes in the living room, cast them all about, much less lounge about in the nude.

Like Hamlet, A Doll’s House is not a play that a company should mount without exactly the right actor of the central role. Yet, in Katherine Gauthier, Soulpepper has chosen the worst actor I have ever seen play the role of Nora. Gauthier speaks in an unmodulated voice seemingly untouched by drama school training. This means she is unable to convey subtext in a play that is all about subtext. To show sadness she cries and to show fear or anger she shouts at which point her words can’t be understood. She acts the text on what seems to be a phrase by phrase basis changing her mood to suit each bit of dialogue but unable to express more than one mood at the same time. This means that she turns smiles and happiness or frowns and sadness on and off as if Nora were emotionally labile or had a personality disorder.

Even in posture and gesture, Gauthier hardly acts like a banker’s wife. She stumbles about shoulders forward like a football player and sits in a chair slinging one leg over the arm like a teenager. It’s Brooks’s fault for allowing this. Nora says that she has absorbed all her husband’s beliefs, but the behaviour of Gauthier’s Nora makes her look like the only inappropriately informal adult in the play.

The end result is that Gauthier is unable to present any sort of emotional throughline for her character. Contrary to a good performance, she does not show how Nora grows wiser as the play progresses and how her game-playing with Torvald becomes increasingly more hollow. In Ibsen, Nora’s gradual enlightenment capped by Torvald’s reaction to Krogstad’s first letter leads to her famous decision to leave her husband and children. In Brooks’s production, Nora’s decision looks just as arbitrary as all her others do because Gauthier

has been switching from emotion to emotion rather than building up a conviction about her life that has no recourse but to burst forth at the end.

Christopher Morris would make a fine Torvald if he didn’t have to accede to some of Brooks’s direction. He shows Torvald’s unconsciously patronizing attitude to Nora very well. Brooks has decided that Torvald’s stiff propriety is hypocritical since he can barely control his sexual desire for Nora in private. To present Torvald this way makes the play more superficial since it makes Nora look as if she is trying to escape his unwanted sexual advances rather than to be free of his stiflingly narrow definition of what women in general should be. Morris does his best to make Torvald’s onset of infantilism effective at the conclusion, but unfortunately it just makes the character look foolish.

It’s vital that their should be some rapport between Torvald and Nora to explain how they met and have stayed together otherwise Nora’s giving it all up would hardly be a sacrifice. Yet, playing against Gauthier is like playing with a cardboard cutout and it’s no surprise there is no chemistry between their characters.

Except for their slow motion entrances all the rest of the cast act the script as a straightforward Ibsen play. As Dr. Rank, Diego Matamoros gives us another iteration of his mordant commentator on life. He, not Torvald, is meant to be the sexual threat that Nora faces in her little society of friends, and is the character that will later become Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler.

Oyin Oladejo, in her best ever performance for Soulpepper, gives Mrs. Linde a simple dignity and focus that contrasts completely with Gauthier’s sequential display of emotions as Nora. Damien Atkins gives an excellent performance as Krogstad, a pathetic man driven to extremes and all the more dangerous because of it. Atkins’s scene with Oladejo where Krogstad and Mrs. Linde finally come to an understanding is the best played, most moving scene in the entire play.

The failure of the current Doll’s House is an example of when a young actor is pushed into a role she is simply not ready for. The fault lies with those at Soulpepper who cast her when there are several young actors around the country who are ready for such a difficult role. The Shaw Festival, amazingly, has never presented A Doll’s House even though it is part of its original mandate and is central to Shaw’s own work. Stratford has also never presented it. Perhaps one of those festivals will provide us with the next chance to see this masterpiece. Or, perhaps an indie company like DVxT will come along unexpectedly and get everything so right that its powerful production directed by Vikki Anderson and starring Fiona Byrne and Ben Carlson is still fresh in the mind even though it was 16 years ago.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www1.soulpepper.ca.

2016-07-28

A Doll's House