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Although Aussie director Simon Stone has staged only a handful of shows in the UK, it has to be said that you can see a pattern developing. Take a classic play – previously Lorca’s Yerma and Seneca's Phaedra – rewrite the whole thing into aggressively modern English that revolves around long, light hearted stretches of posh people swearing amusingly, season with a bit of Berlin-indebted stage trickery, and finally change tack and wallop us with the tragedy, right in the guts.
The Lady from the Sea is based on Ibsen’s 1888 drama of the same name, and shares its basic plot beats while tinkering with much of the underlying characterisation and motives.
In a starry production. Edward (Andrew Lincoln) is a wealthy neurosurgeon married to his second wife Ellida (Alicia Vikander), a successful writer. They live with Edward’s two pathologically precocious daughters from his first marriage: Asa (Grace Oddie-Jones), who is at university, and Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike), who is at school. Tossed into the mix are Heath (Joe Alwyn), a hot but nerdy distant cousin who has come to Edward to get a diagnosis for a worrying neurological symptoms, and Lyle (John Macmillan), Edward and Ellida’s droll family friend, who is also hot but nerdy.
On Lizzie Clachlan’s bougie white thrust set – suggestive of a fancy modern home, without spelling it out – The Lady from the Sea proceeds exactly as you’d expect a Simon Stone play to proceed. There is a lot of very posh banter, that’s very entertaining in a Made in Chelsea sort of way. Asa drawls on about her OnlyFans account to an embarrassed Lyle; there is some business about it being the anniversary of the girls’ mother’s suicide; for a little while it looks like the most significant plot driver is Heath’s swiftly reached terminal diagnosis and Hilda’s conclusion that this is very sexy.
When it’s serious, it’s very good
Things switch up a gear when a news report catches their attention: a man convicted of murdering a security guard on an oil rig 20 years ago has been released from prison. This agitates Ellida, who eventually confessed to Edward that she and the man, Finn, had an intense sexual relationship that began when she was 15 and he was in his thirties. She’d run away from home to be an eco activist, and he was her mentor; their relationship ended when she inadvertently knocked the security guard off a rig they were trying to board – something Finn took the rap for.
Except that wasn’t the end of their relationship as far as he was concerned. As the first half ends, Brendan Cowell’s menacingly insouciant Finn shows up to collect what he sees as his.
This is all preposterous of course, the oil rig story making it sillier than the original play by some distance. And yet godammit, Stone is so good at the serious stuff. After the interval, Clachlan’s design ostentatiously becomes a negative of itself – ie the white set is now black. And on it, the scenes between Vikander and Cowell are electric. Vikander offers a magnificently complex study in ambivalence as her small, neat frame is contorted by a muscle memory of lust combined with a dawning revulsion about the implications of how young she was when this stuff happened. In her English language stage debut, the Oscar-winning Swede is excellent - rather than giving us thespy fireworks, she’s inner conflict personified.
Cowell is good too - initially he seems like a menacing force of nature, malevolently dismissive of the aghast Edward, utterly sure Ellida is his to reclaim. But it’s not long before his long-held certainties are challenged and if he doesn’t exactly change his ways, he finds himself on the defensive; unexpectedly vulnerable.
This all seems to be happening in a different universe to the Scooby Gang-like adventures the rest of the characters who – Edward’s freakout over the Finn’s appearance notwithstanding – simply continue their banter at a nearby hotel, having reluctantly agreed to give Elida time to work things out with her ex. Big name Lincoln does a solid job as an overly controlling but fundamentally decent posh boy, who ultimately accepts he can’t stage manage the lives of everyone he knows – not just Ellida, but his daughters too. It’s a shame his scenes with Vikander are so limited.
Stone is a real throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks guy. He excavates some interesting, complex stuff on consent, memory and the controlling nature of men. He loves thunderously over the top symbolism, and I’d say for the most part he’s right – the set switch from black to white is cool as fuck, and the aggressive use of a rain machine in the second half will be divisive but I thought it gave the production heft by making performing such an obvious endurance test for the increasingly waterlogged cast.
Some stuff feels throwaway: Heath and his imminent death may have some carpe diem-style thematic relevance if you really squint, but he feels like an unwanted inheritance from Ibsen’s original plot that Stone basically treats as a joke.
Some stuff feels cringe: in Stone’s take the girls’ late mother was Black, and there is a whole strand about what it’s like to grow up as a mixed race young woman in a privileged white English community that feels a bit questionable for a white middle-aged Australian man to feel he needs to graft on to the play.
Stone’s Lady from the Sea is a tonally uneven play with a weird relationship with the source material and plenty of moments of pure indulgence. But here’s the thing: when it’s serious, it’s very good. And when it’s silly it remains maddeningly entertaining.