A Doll’s House review

Herzog’s writing feels as shaved to the bone as the direction – brutal and awkward at times. Her Torvald (Moayed at his creepiest) is irritatingly obnoxious from the jump, and when he calls Nora “baby”, we cringe. Herzog’s Nora is more an active participant in her own mistakes than she is in Ibsen’s original.

But Chastain has to make all her character’s emotional leaps and bounds while mostly sitting still in a chair – sometimes it is like watching a frog being boiled alive. We understand she is trapped in her world, but the staging stultifies the material and gives the performers a minuscule range to work from.

While framed in contrast to Nora’s marriage, Chastain comes alive when she and Thornton flirt. Staging the moment as if engaging in breathy phone-sex – full of pregnant pauses and innuendo – for a moment, the play is made flesh, but this liveness is fleeting.

The production’s heavy-handed stylistic symbolism and clinical simplicity guts the humanity of the play. Parallels between characters from Ibsen’s text are lost, relationships are opaque, the characters all sit in grey sameness, there is a refrigerator chill where emotion should be.

Worse, the self-serious, tone-deaf direction dials up the sense of ridiculousness. When the audience laughs, it may not be with the play but at it, which feels like a questionable directorial choice. Still, despite this, Nora’s final monologue remains depressingly relevant to women today. And what is there to laugh about there?