Almeida Theatre

Anya Reiss’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a panic attack in textual form, that smartly amplifies the debt-related anxieties that underpin the 1879 original into something extremely modern and extremely nerve-wracking. Nora (Romola Garai) is an anxious, impulsive woman, who we first meet in her bougie rental house surrounded by obscene amounts of Christmas shopping. Her workaholic husband Torvald (Tom Mothersdale) is taken aback by the sprawl of purchases, but Garai’s Nora remains brittly giddy, reminding him of how different this is to their last Christmas: they are on the cusp of being rich, with the last stages of the multimillion-pound sale of his company going through.  It is, however, all built on a lie, albeit a lie Nora has very nearly gotten away with. Desperate after Torvald’s drug addiction almost ruined them, she laid her hands on a vast sum of money to pay for him to go to a fancy rehab centre. He believes – or chooses to believe – that it was paid for by an improbable inheritance from Nora’s late father. In fact, she acquired it by illicit means that finally come out when Torvald lets go of his longterm employee Nils (James Corrigan), who tells Nora that her secret is dependent on his being reinstated.  Reiss’s updates are an impressively incisive, white-knuckle engagement with contemporary anxieties Reiss is a former Royal Court prodigy who made a big splash in her late teens and early twenties before mostly drifting off into TV. Although...

In a grimly timely stage adaptation of a major Iranian work, Nadia Latif directs Carmen Nasr’s adaoptation of Babak Anvari’s Bafta-winning horror film. Under the Shadow is set in ’80s Tehran, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, and follows a mother and her daughter who are haunted by a mysterious entity after they refuse to evacuate the city. Leila Farzad stars in the lead role of mother Shideh.