Rejecting her husband’s disparagement, Nora Helmer walks out the door, leaving him and two small children behind.
That was the final scene of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first performed in Copenhagen in 1879. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, written in 2017 by American playwright Lucas Hnath, Nora returns 15 years later with a knock on the same door.
The door is opened by the maid, Anne Marie, and through the ensuing greetings, questions, and evasions, we learn what Nora has been up to, and why she’s come back.
Despite his impressive patriarchal beard, Ibsen supported the rights of women, which weren’t much more than those given a child in the 19th Century. Ibsen’s wife Suzannah Daae Thoresen was a fiercely independent intellectual, and through her, he became a close friend and correspondent with Camilla Collett, who was a founder of the feminist movement in Norway.
Hnath pays tribute to Ibsen’s views as expressed in his plays, giving Nora her own terms and a platform from which to present her views on marriage and the oppression of women. His script does an excellent job of recreating and extending the world in which Ibsen wrote, as well as the themes and domestic dilemmas in which he dealt. But Hnath does not let Nora’s views (revolutionary for the 19th Century) go unchallenged. Both Nora’s adult daughter Emmy, and her husband Thorvald are given the space to put forward their arguments for marriage and what it means for two people to committed to growing and evolving together, while Anne Marie reflects the general societal views. These arguments challenge Nora’s views , and the suspense largely lies in wondering what decision she will come to. Her ultimate decision, however, although largely pre-determined by having to stay true to the views Ibsen espoused in his own work, is the script’s one downfall.
Written as if we’re in the late 1800s, the laws governing marriage – the central concern of the play – have thankfully changed, but it is surprising how pertinent Nora’s concerns remain. The script is, despite its disappointing ending, a triumph. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the staging thereof.
Like Ibsen’s original, A Doll’s House, Part 2 is not driven by action but by dialogue, most of it reasonable given the situation, although there is a riveting scene in which Thorvald and Nora ascend into a climax of rage. As such, the play demands an emotional depth and range from the actors; there are oceanic depths of feeling needed to give weight to the words. In this, Bianca Amato as Nora and Zane Meas as Thorvald don’t quite succeed. Simone Neethling as Emmy Helmer does not succeed at all.
In the opening scene Amato has to embody a conflicting mix of triumph, discomfort, and anxiety, which she seems to do with an impressive array of quick stiff smiles, arched brows and twitching fingers. But by the end of the second scene we realise this is largely the extent of her range; the arched brow, the supercilious look, the tight smile are on shuffle mode.
Meas, on the other hand, is at first hard to believe as Thorvald, but gains some depth as the play progresses, possibly because it takes a while to see past his screen character. Neethling, who was well praised for her lead role in Romeo and Juliet at Maynardville, seemed adrift here. Her Emmy more closely resembled a ghost than a feisty young woman encountering her mother for the first time as an adult. Given the substance of her Juliet, I’m loathe to cast aspersions on her ability, and wonder if Barbara Rubin’s directorial decisions, or simply an off night (they happen) could be to blame. That left Charlotte Butler as Anne Marie to carry the can, which, ironically, is what Anne Marie does in the play. Despite a seeming aversion to looking up at us, the audience, Butler as the nanny-stroke-maid was by far the most believable actor on the night.
The set and lighting, much like the performance, seemed impressive at first, but revealed their faults during the course of the play. As the figurative curtain rose late, we had a good nine minutes or more to appreciate what looked like a solid box set built to resemble a parlour or drawing room with a door (The door) set squarely in the middle. With its pilasters, cornices, egg-blue walls darkened along the bottom to give a sense of height, its large square velvet-looking panes adding further luxury to the walls, along with sconces emitting soft light, it looked all the world like a room in Norway circa 1890. The four evenly spaced chairs were also well chosen for the period. Greg King’s set paid attention to detail and looked like a winner. A disappointment to discover, then, that the velvet-textured panes adding luxury to the walls were scrims that became transparent when the light shone in the ‘passage’ behind them. This was an interesting manoeuvre. The problem was that it was never put to good use, doing nothing more than reveal there was no ‘house’ beyond the room, just theatre black. If we’re being very generous, we could read it as an attempt to reveal the lie of the theatre in the way Nora reveals the lie of the marriage, but the metaphor, if it exists at all, failed: it pushed us away from the world we imagine before us, rather than maintaining the theatrical illusion this play seemed to require.
There was also a strange choice to switch – quite dramatically – from the realistic soft light in which the scenes are played, to garish neon during the swift scene changes. I can only think this was a nod to Christiaan Olwagen’s post-modern pop version of A Doll’s House which played at the Baxter in 2016. Clever, but disconcerting and for no discernible reason than to be an obscure reference.
These strange choices, along with acting that never quite achieved the emotional depth needed to transform the play beyond the enactment of a script, in all created a competent version of Hnath’s play, rather than an engrossing one. To the extent that, beyond the limited pleasure of being critically engaged in watching people act a play, we were left wondering if the evening might not have been better spent reading it.
A Doll’s House, Part 2 runs at the Baxter Golden Arrow Studio until 10 May. Shows are at 8pm with matinees at 2.30pm. Tickets cost between R180 and R250, booking through Webtickets.