James Karas
Director Daniel Brooks
Set Designer Lorenzo
Savoini
Costumes Designer Victoria
Wallace
Lighting Kevin Lamotte
Composer
And Sound
Designer Richard Feren
Nora Katherine Gauthier
Torvald Christopher Morris
Kristine Linde Oyin
Oladejo
Dr. Rank Diego
Matamoros
Nils Krogstad Damien
Atkins
Runs until August 27, 2016 at the Young Centre for the
Performing Arts, 55 Tank House Lane, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca
***** (out of 5)
Here is your chance to see Henrik
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for the first time. You may have seen many other
productions but you have never seen anything quite like the one directed by
Daniel Brooks for Soulpepper. It is original, riveting and brilliant.
We all know that Nora Helmer, her
husband Torvald’s doll, leaves him and her
children in a revolutionary gesture of liberation that shocked many people to
their roots in 1879. A woman leaving her husband is unlikely to register at all
today let alone provoke shock and revulsion.
Christopher Morris, Katherine
Gauthier. Photo Cylla von Tiedemann
As adapted by Frank McGuinness, Brooks
sets the play in a modern house with contemporary white furniture and a blank
wall at the back. It is realistic and unrealistic at the same time. Nora is a
modern woman, lively, sexy, loving, perhaps a bit too materialistic and eager
to move up the social ladder, but overall a marvelous wife and mother. Make no
mistake about Katherine Gauthier’s portrayal. She displays all the latter
qualities and shows us her deeper anguish with unerring precision. An
astounding performance.
Torvald is a very good husband.
He loves his wife, tolerates her spending habits and does everything to
maintain a happy house. Nora and Torvald are, sexually, socially, financially,
happy, happy, happy. Well, something will come up to shatter all and
Christopher Morris will show us another side of Torvald that explains much
about the final scene of the play. Kudos to Morris.
We soon realize that most of the
characters of A Doll’s House live
behind a mask, have a deep secret and are forced
to hide behind a hypocritical façade. Nora borrowed forty-eight thousand from Nils
Krogstad by forging her father’s signature. Krogstad has an unsavory past.
Atkins plays the greasy-haired Krogstad superbly bringing out his anguish,
desperation and decency.
Dr. Rank, the ill family friend,
has his own secret, which he reveals basically on his way to his deathbed.
Nora’s friend Kristine Linde is in the same league. Well done performances by
Matamoros and Oladejo.
Diego Matamoros, Christopher
Morris, Katherine Gauthier, Oyin Oladejo. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
Brooks has given the production a
sense of unreality by having the characters enter the stage at times in slow
motion as if sleepwalking. The happy façade of Nora and Torvald’s life is
palpable and there is nothing to indicate that Nora will or needs to make such
a dramatic exit in the end.
The enormous success of the
director, the creative team and the actors is to “fool” us into sitting on the
edge of our seats about the outcome of those horrible secrets and to have no
real appreciation of what is so clearly happening before us. When the masks
come off and the hypocrisy is blown away like morning fog we are stunned.
Much credit needs to be given to
Frank McGuinness for a fluid adaptation that adds to the acceptance of Nora and
Torvald being a modern couple even though there are some obvious elements that
are unlikely to be present. Soulpepper tells that this is a translation by McGuiness
set in 1996 England. Neither is strictly true. McGuinness took liberties with
the text and truly modernized the milieu. The Nora and Torvald of 1879 would
never have been shown as being sexually on fire the way they are in this
production. And there is really nothing
to indicate England.
A maid and a nanny (maybe), a
mailbox where people drop off letters and calling
cards are not likely to be found even in an upper middle class house.
But no matter. This is why you go
to the theatre.
No comments:
Post a Comment