Review: A Doll's House, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

It's probably best to start this review by being upfront: I absolutely love Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). I remember the first time I picked it up when I was doing my Masters and being absolutely blown away by the play, and especially the final scene between the play's central protagonists Nora and Torvald Helmer. I remember being astounded by the power with which Ibsen was able to articulate Nora's journey towards self-knowledge and found the denouement heartbreakingly moving.

Despite my love for the play, however, in nearly ten years, I had yet to see it performed. So when I saw that the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was putting on a production this month, and moreover that Nora was to be played by Cush Jumbo, an actor whom I had greatly admired two years ago for her performance of Rosalind in the Exchange's production of As You Like It, I was thrilled and knew I had to go and see it.

A seat with a view: one of the pleasures of the Exchange is that, as a theatre in the round, the audience not only gets a great view of all the action wherever they are seated, but when you're sat at stage level, you can get so close to the action that just walking to your seat takes you virtually into the set.

So, having secured my ticket, how did I find the play? Well I have to confess to overall being a little disappointed in the production: it didn't blow me away like I thought it would do. But, given my love for the play as a text, I'm not sure whether the fault lay with the production itself or with my preconceptions about the play and how I imagine it should be performed (one of the reasons why I very rarely watch television adaptations of novels that I have read: the disconnect between a director's vision of a text and my vision of a text is often too great to allow me to enjoy the television production, and all I end up doing is a great impersonation of an old woman who has lost it a bit by shouting at the television screen about the many things that I believe are wrong with the adaptation rather than just enjoying the programme as a separate and discrete text). Jumbo plays up the doll-like aspects to Nora's character well - from the opening conceit of the macaroons through to the self-absorbed nature of her conversations with Krogstad - but I felt that this was focused on at the expense of showing the other side of Nora's character. For me at least, part of the pleasure of the play is Nora's slowly emerging consciousness of the falseness of her position and her resistance to that emerging consciousness: whilst the play itself is an excellent critique of patriarchal society and women's position within that society, when the play is performed as opposed to just read, it should first and foremost be a compelling portrayal of psychological drama. I felt that Jumbo's portrayal of Nora lacked a certain subtlety that made her performance 'good' rather than 'great' in this regard: too many small, yet pivotal, moments were either under or overplayed, so that the performance as a whole did not pack the punch that I was anticipating, but whether that was because of dramatic choices made by the actor or because I approached the play with unrealistic expectations is probably up for debate. Helmer was, I felt, generally successfully performed: David Sturzaker captured the character's inherent sanctimoniousness well, although his venality was not explored in any great detail. Jamie De Courcey, Kelly Hotten and Jack Tarlton all provided notable support to the main protagonists, with Tarlton in particular hitting all the right notes in his portrayal of Krogstad.

So, ultimately, what to make of this Doll's House? Overall it was an enjoyable experience, if not a completely satisfying one (for me at least anyway; from the applause ringing around the theatre at the end of the night, I think I was in a minority). However, whilst the central performance did not quite pack the punch that I was anticipating, what was a revelation to me was the humour that can be found within the play. A number of times the theatre rang out not to anguished words from the play's protagonists but to peals of laughter from the audience, a sure sign of the truism that there is a fine line between tragedy and comedy, leading me to the conclusion that in hands other than Ibsen's, the narrative of A Doll's House could easily make a farce. In so managing to open up a new perspective on the play for me, so this production of A Doll's House can be considered to have triumphed.

A Doll's House concludes at the Exchange tonight, Saturday 01 June 2013.