Glossy shopping bags from Selfridges, Hamley’s and Lego pile up on stage, while an improbably large Christmas tree is wrapped in retail plastic. Among them, a married couple grasp at each other, turned on by their own reckless spending. Playwright Anya Reiss has updated Henrik Ibsen’s feminist classic for the Klarna era, turning it into a story of cocaine-fuelled greed and degradation.
Romola Garai stars as Nora, an impulsive, loving mother who uses sex to navigate the nightmare she has created. However, she does not quite achieve the great awakening that makes the original so beloved. Reiss excels at capturing the nastier side of upper-middle-class family life, as she did in her debut Spur of the Moment. Here, Nora is addicted to Instagram, broadcasting a life of enviable wealth: a husband on the brink of selling his finance startup, two excited children, and a white-walled palace. The reality is uglier: the house is rented, the children ignored, and Torvalt (Tom Mothersdale) is a cocaine addict whose past could ruin them.
The decision to move the play into the 21st-century world of investment banking shifts its focus from a critique of patriarchy to a hammer blow against capitalism. The original narrative hinged on Nora forging a signature on a cheque; here, she is a university-educated woman willing to bend rules. James Corrigan plays Nils Krogstad, who helps her “borrow” nearly a million from a client’s account. “It’s just numbers on a screen... it comes and goes,” she says.
Despite Garai’s efforts, this Nora remains underwritten and unlikeable, which becomes problematic in the final scenes. She claims to be waking up, but it is hard to imagine her slamming the door on her comfortable life. Joe Hill-Gibbins’s staging is provocative and fun but lacks emotional depth, torn between honouring Ibsen’s structure and demolishing it. Perhaps it is time Reiss created characters of her own.
