'A Doll's House' review

Richard Davies is highly impressed by the first production by the new artistic director of the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith, a new adaptation of Ibsen’s classic drama set in colonial India...

OUR VERDICT

A new adaptation by Tanika Gupta of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House is the first production by The Lyric Theatre Hammersmith’s new artistic director, Rachel O’Riordan. It is an ambitious and highly promising start to an exciting new era in the life of this beautiful old theatre.

In Gupta’s retelling of this classic play, the story has been transposed from Denmark to Calcutta, set in 1879 – the same year that the play was written - at the peak of the British Empire in India. Nora/Niru is the young Indian wife of Tom, a colonial administrator. At the play’s start, Tom is celebrating his promotion to Chief of Tax Collection and is looking forward to enjoying the rewards of his position. But Tom is not the only person who hopes to benefit from his advancement. Niru receives a visit from her former friend, the recently widowed Mrs Lahiri, who is now desperately in need of employment. Tom admires her hunger for work and promptly dismisses one of his employees Kaushik Das to make way for her. But what he doesn’t know is that Das is a secret moneylender who has his wife Niru in thrall for a debt that she obtained with a false signature eight years before, when Tom was seriously ill.

With its Raj setting, the original theme of social injustice to women becomes mixed with themes of racism and colonial oppression. At first, Niru appears remarkably nonchalant about her husband’s patronising attitude to his ‘skylark’ wife’, as he scolds her for being a spendthrift and for eating sweets. She appears equally content to have given up her Hindu religion to become a Christian, to have her children named ‘Peter and Bob’ and to be rejected socially by the wives of her husband’s friends. Instead, Niru has discovered her own ways of getting what she wants from life through her simple charm and natural flirtatiousness. But when Das’s blackmail is uncovered, Tom’s brutal accusations are more than she can bear and forces her to wake up to the reality of her situation.

Anjana Vasan is outstanding in the role of Niru. Her radiant features fill the stage and she moves with a dancer’s grace, as though walking on a gymnastic beam. Her relationships with Mrs Lahiri and Uma, both played to perfection by Tripti Tripuraneni and Arinder Sadhra are totally convincing. The scene where she asks family friend Dr Rank - played by the excellent Colin Tierney - to tie on her dancing bells is electrifying.

Eliot Cowan who plays Tom Helmer both looks and sounds the part, but struggles to find a way to play the role sympathetically and too often comes across as a melodramatic villain. This is in part a failure of the adaptation. While you can imagine someone being a bit peeved that their spouse had gone behind their back to borrow money fraudulently from a junior member of their team, Tom’s reaction is so monstrous on so many levels that it is hard to see where you go from there. While someone of his class who marries a local woman could be seen as a social progressive, in Tom’s case it seems more likely that he chose an Indian bride because it suits his control freakery. A British wife even in that era might have been less likely to tolerate his foul behaviour.

Overall, this is a thoughtful production that brings new life and energy to a classic play.  Credit is also due to Lily Arnold for her highly evocative set design that brings to life the inner courtyard of an Indian house. The atmosphere is also greatly enhanced by composer Arun Ghosh who brilliantly performs his own music on set with a variety of instruments.

Dates: 6 September - 12 October, 7.30 pm (click here for full information on the event)