Theatre

The Lady from the Sea
Until May 31
This event has finished
Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola St, London, E8 2DJ
Rating:
By Robert Shore

Posted: Tue May 6
How immensely strange Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 oceanic psychodrama is. Caught between land and sea, the water-loving Ellida cannot make up her mind between her provincial-doctor husband and a mysterious returning sailor to whom she once plighted her troth. In its concern for the social condition of women and the need for personal freedom, ‘The Lady from the Sea’ is not unrelated to ‘A Doll’s House’. But the themes of that much earlier and more celebrated work have been reconfigured as a social comedy-cum-Shakespearean late romance with distinctly Freudian overtones and a happy ending.

Hannah Eidinow has assembled a fine cast for this first staging of Frank McGuinness’s new adaptation, the high percentage of Irish accents giving an unusual Celtic shading to Ibsen’s Nordic fairytale. McGuinness’s version captures the story’s stirring morbidity, although the tonal uncertainty means that the odd colloquialism, principally delivered by Fiona O’Shaughnessy’s spirited Hilde, sounds rather jarring.

Though, in the symbolic scheme of the play, Ibsen’s heroine is figured as a mermaid marooned on a rock and gasping for life, Lia Williams’s hydrophiliac Ellida is a thoroughly unelemental presence, unmoved by tidal passions but rather trapped in a state of permanent, slightly pernickety agitation, the shadow of derangement hanging over her angular figure. Indeed, there’s a distinct lack of aquatic attraction in Eidinow’s production as a whole. Rocks, trees and a strip of blue evoke the Norwegian landscape, but the hypnotic lure of the sea is never really suggested.