SCOTTISH THEATRE REVIEWS: Theatre Babel

Educating Agnes

By Liz Lochhead/Molière

Published in The Guardian 2/5/08

Hedda Gabler

by Henrik Ibsen

Published in The Guardian 21/4/05

A Doll's House

March 2004

© MARK FISHER published in The Sunday Times

One hundred years before John Gray wrote Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Henrik Ibsen produced the prototype. Men and women “don't understand each other,” the Norwegian playwright wrote in 1879, “but in practical life, woman is judged by masculine law.”

He was referring to A Doll's House, his play in which the marriage of Nora and Torvald Helmer disintegrates because her idea of commitment to the family doesn't square with his idea of civic probity. When Torvald discovers that Nora once forged a signature on a promissory note to raise the cash to give him a year-long rest break, his self-centred reaction exposes a marriage not of equals, but of master and servant. As Nora puts it, she has spent eight years as a doll in his play house.

In its day, the play was highly controversial - especially because of Nora's final decision to walk out on her husband and children - but the battle of the sexes is a perennial theme that is scarcely less pertinent today. The feminist advances of the past century might have taken the edge off the play's radicalism, but they haven't negated its themes. Men and women continue to negotiate their relationships: how else could so much money be made from publishing simplistic books about us being creatures from Mars and Venus?

If there's mileage in Ibsen's play it's that its analysis is not so simplistic. True, like his acolyte Arthur Miller, he has a tendency to draw his conflicts in bold, easy-to-read strokes, but again like Miller, he is too much of a humanist to let the politics override the drama. A Doll's House is far more than a black-and-white piece of agitprop about suffering women and evil men.

The weakness of Peter McAllister's touring production for Theatre Babel, however, is that it refuses to entertain any such ideas of complexity. He creates a Mars-Venus world where the actors, unquestionably capable of more nuanced performances, give colour-by-numbers portrayals that quell the play's passions. So Stephen Hogan's Torvald is stern and severe, Pauline Knowles's Mrs Linde, Nora's old friend, is prim and proper, and Stephen Clyde's Krogstad, Nora's blackmailer, is dark and bad-tempered.

They are two-dimensional interpretations that leave you in no doubt of the play's driving forces, but that keep pulling it back to the level of Victorian melodrama. Clearly, A Doll's House is richer than that, but there's a stiff, strait-laced quality about the production - not helped by a dated translation ambiguously attributed to “literal translations as well as early 20th century adaptations” - that seems to suggest it's no longer a play for today.

This is despite a rather lovely set by Babel main man, Graham McLaren. Taking inspiration from the simplicity of the great director Peter Brook, he places the action on a large rug with a minimum of props and the actors sitting in full view in front of a lush red velvet backdrop decorated with fleur-de-lis. Yes, it's been done before, but it's clean and modern, and powerfully lit by Kai Fisher. It's a shame, therefore, that McAllister's production ignores the openness and pretends there's a fourth wall between actor and audience just like the theatre of old.

Above all, it's a humourless interpretation, as if the only way to do the classics - especially gloomy Scandinavians - is to be po-faced about it. Babel, a company dedicated to such plays, proved that categorically wrong a couple of years ago with Liz Lochhead's witty Medea, but the experience hasn't rubbed off.

Still, Rebecca Rodgers gives an admirable performance as Nora, growing from kittenish wife to self-willed individual with credible force. As befits a classic play, her closing scene with Torvald is fraught and gripping. It's the culmination of a production that is clean and lean (straight through without an interval), but one that tells the play like it is and no more.

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