As the linen‑clad and amber‑whiffed intelligentsia tittle‑tattle, the Almeida is alive with the implicant buzz of... money.
135 years have elapsed since Henrik Ibsen’s original 1879 setting and Anya Reiss’s ground-breaking 2014 re-contextualisation - but what, if anything, has changed?
“The stars, start with the stars,” my editor’s voice hums in my subconscious. Romola Garai is our lead, Nora. Blonde hair tumbling, constantly battled backwards, the coquettishness is largely replaced in this iteration by out‑and‑out sexuality.
Unable to keep secrets and trampling all over the British implicits of good manners when discussing money, she flounders as her partner, the financier Torvald (Tom Mothersdale), sells his company for untold millions—billions.
Together they craft an utterly toxic relationship, repeating “I’m happy” unconvincingly. Barbed with guilt, avoidance and manipulation, they’re the couple you would avoid at a dinner party, yet be unable to fully explain why.
Descending (like everyone) onto the plush carpets of Hyemi Shin’s minimalist, bleached townhouse, they roll around on top of one another, never truly understanding a word the other says, pacing in circles, at each other’s throats like sparring cats.
Olivier Huband is the pontificating doctor, dying - metaphorically and physically - with love for Nora and cancer. Thalissa Teixeira is a husky, sombre Kristine, a destitute university friend, and James Corrigan is the avenging angel, Torvald’s desperate ex‑colleague, Nils. All fully understand the modernisation, throwing themselves spiritedly into Reiss’s adaptation and Joe Hill‑Gibbins’s brutal direction.
Cramming the three acts into a beastly first (1 hour 50) and a sharp second is one way of tightening the piece. In my view, recontextualisation is paramount for a play that, on the centenary of Ibsen’s death in 2006, was the world’s most performed work of that year.
But what, really, are the differences between the late 19th century and the early 21st? Why then? Why now?
Nora, grappling for a way to pay off the massive loan she takes to save her drug‑addict husband, drops to her knees and looks out at us - the glittering audience. “Where can I get money?” she pleads.
This is the only moment where the adaptation feels uncomfortable, as it is never fully explained why Nora doesn’t work, coming across as neither truly aristocratic nor entirely a sugar-baby.
The focus on capital and its erosive effects on relationships is needed, as thankfully many of the issues that made it a feminist work (though not Ibsen’s intention) no longer cut quite so sharply in a modern context.
The production really starts printing money - metaphorically this time - with its move into the world of high finance and investment firms.
Nora dances to Megan Boni’s 'Looking for a Man in Finance' in a revealing nurse’s outfit at the end of the second act, both the doctor and her husband grinding on either side, grubby and greed-soaked.
Yet the most haunting moments belong to Garai, pacing like a frustrated hyena behind the men she cannot seem to bend to her will.
Her growing distance from reality is compounded by phones, baby monitors and door cameras: all avenues through which she interacts with the life she believes she wants, but which stubbornly refuses to make her happy.
Christmas in April is oddly unsettling; nevertheless, it contributes to Reiss’s rooted commonality - that although women can now engage in financial decisions in ways impossible in 1879, the pursuit of wealth, happiness and accumulation at almost any cost has only worsened.
The characters crawl and creep through an underhand world that society has somehow come to idolise.
The cliff‑hanger, as Nora hears her children through the baby monitor, skirts close to the “barbaric outrage” ending Ibsen was forced to write for a more conservative German public - yet still leaves us in sufficient gloom to twist the theatrical knife deep into our hearts.
A Doll's House
31 March - 23 May 2026
The Almeida
Almeida Street
N1 1TA
