Writer-director Simon Stone is known for his rock’n’roll takes on the classics. This is a characteristically high-octane version of Ibsen’s play: loud, modern and led by screen stars Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. Yet his script, again created in the rehearsal process, retains all of Ibsen’s layers and adds some of its own in the updating.
All mystical talk of the sea and mermaids is excised. The production brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged yet complex family at its heart that seems to be slowly drowning: Ellida (Vikander), as the young, second wife of neurologist Edward (Lincoln), is caught between life with her husband and a long lost, formative ex-lover, Finn (Brendan Cowell), who makes a reappearance. Ellida’s stepdaughters, Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James), are trying to stay afloat amid grief for their biological mother, who killed herself.
Stone blends psychological intensity with overblown angst and amped-up humour. Where that mix of the comic, domestic and tragic grated in his recent Phaedra, here the ridiculously OTT family rows offset the razor-sharp tension of Vikander and Lincoln’s deeply felt performances. Vikander does not pull back from her character’s exposure while Lincoln is a pained alpha male forced to cede control and made vulnerable.
The question of female free will, pivotal to so many of Ibsen’s plays, is key in the original: Ellida is “granted” her freedom by Edward. But in Stone’s version, she is not a passive or mentally fragile woman and it is clear she has free will, even though Edward is still medicating her. Here, she is not just caught between the security of middle-class existence with Edward versus freedom and passion with Finn – a charismatic climate activist – but also between ideology, responsibility in love and questions of consent.
The play deftly unpicks the two male figures as well as her own psychology. Initially, they seem to represent Ibsen’s binary forces – Finn akin to elemental passion, Edward signifying convention. But there is more to it than that and Ellida wakes up to the imbalance of power and coercive elements in both relationships. Her past love for Finn is fleshed out and made more complicated by an age difference: she was 15 when she met him, he in his 30s. The myth of Leda, echoed in Ellida’s name, takes on eerie resonances. So does a storyline around climate protest and the criminalising of activism.
Lizzie Clachan’s set wavers between realism and symbolism, changing from bright summer white to black in the second act, which becomes sodden with rainwater as the play’s dark passions are unleashed.
The comic anger and rows remain, becoming shrill: distant cousin Lyle (John Macmillan) is amusingly wry but young sculptor Heath (Joe Alwyn), who has a terminal diagnosis (not the TB-like illness of the original), too inconceivably jokes about his imminent death. Hilda, whose mother was Black, speaks of being mixed-race in an overwhelmingly white town in shouty ways that seem latched on.
None of this takes away from the full-bodied intensity of the production, which is fantastically original, gripping and magnificent to the end.
