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You can take Ibsen out of Norway, but you can’t take Norway out of Ibsen. Or that’s the impression given by this attempt to relocate the melancholic Norwegian to the middle of the Caribbean.
It’s great to see rising star writer Elinor Cook get a gig at the Donmar with her new adaptation of 1888’s ‘The Lady from the Sea’. But while solid, it’s difficult to see why exactly she decided to wash the story up in the tropics, somewhere around the end of the colonial era. There’s plenty of enjoyably spiky humour, but little exploration of a scenario rife with post-colonial possibility.
Nikki Amuka-Bird is excellent as troubled heroine Ellida; but with most of the rest of the cast white, incoming Young Vic boss Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production feels like a story about a random group of ex-pats living on a particularly Nordic patch of the Atlantic. Or really – and despite the nifty rock pool set from Tom Scutt – it feels like it’s still set in remote Norway.
What I’m driving at is that it could feel bolder, but it is possible to get too hung up on these things – get past the aesthetics and it’s sensitively directed and performed. Lighthouse-keeper’s daughter Ellida is free-spirited but eminently sensible, and feels shackled by her marriage to Finbar Lynch’s Dr Wangel, her past promises to her roguish ex The Stranger (Jake Fairbrother), and her guilt over the death of her and Wangel’s child. But Amuka-Bird doesn’t portray her as some fey creature – just a smart woman who feels oppressed by society’s bullshit. Relative newcomers Ellie Bamber and Helena Wilson are particularly great as Wangel’s daughters Hilde and Bolette – the first hilariously brattish and over-emotional, the other radiantly decent and thoughtful.
It’s a lovely production, really. But considering it might have served as a breakthrough for Cook, and a sign Kwei-Armah was a master of the sort of European fare the Young Vic is currently famous for, it feels a little underwhelming in its modesty.