Review - A Doll's House, The Donmar Warehouse

A bit like the guests on Marcus Brigstock's radio and now TV show I've Never Seen Star Wars who confess to not having experienced something that would have assumed they had, I have to admit shamefacedly that I have never seen a production of A Doll's House. I know that I have seen clips on telly and I'm aware of productions that have happened but up until last night I have been faking it more than an MP's mortgage repayment.

I was led to believe however that Ibsen, in 1879, had, in telling the story of Nora Helmer and her husband Torvold, produced the first feminist play. A scandalous attack on conventional marriage norms whereby Nora's dutiful wife comes to realise that the love of her husband is conditional on her playing the innocent girl and rejecting this role she leaves him and her children to "find" herself.

However in Zinnie Harris' new translation as directed by Kfir Yefet it's actually about a lovely man with titian red hair who loves his wife very much for two hours and 10 minutes of a two hours and twenty minutes play, only quite rightly losing his temper with her for ten minutes because she, being blackmailed by a nasty northern oik, has compromised his reputation and she not realising when she's on to a good thing bleats on about equality and leaves him devastated and howling in pain.`

Why has this change in emphasis occurred? Because someone had the bright idea of casting Toby Stephens as husband Thomas. Toby Stephens...the only carrot-topped Bond baddie, Toby Stephens...a swoon-enducing Mr Rochester, Toby Stephens whose performance is the sexiest turn since Hugh Jackman strolled onto the National stage singing about the corn being as high as an elephant's eye! At one point Thomas compliments himself for having such an attractive wife and patronizingly crows about his "ownership" of her, the good folk of the Donmar audience harumph politically correctly while I swear that every woman is secretly screaming "own me, own me!"

In updating the text Zinnie Harris has transformed Torvold the bank manager to Thomas the newly elected cabinet minister, and statements about transparency and trust produced chuckles from the auditorium and along with Nora's blackmailing plot gave the whole thing a whiff of Wildean An Ideal Husband.

Gillian Anderson, beautiful, looking like a Singer Sargent portrait, does all she can by hand wringing and foot-stamping to make me care, but how could she leave him? It does not make sense!

Tara Fitzgerald plays her schoolfriend Christine and inexpicably holds a torch but a lack of seating for Christopher Eccleston's blackmailer, who really should lighten up. I'd love to see Eccleston do comedy, maybe some tap-dancing sometime, though it's a moot point whether you can shuffle, ball, change with a permanent sneer on your face. Archie Rice maybe?

Three great theatrical male howls ...Jonathan Pryce in the Almeida's production of The Goat or Who Is Sylvia when he is confronted with the body of his dead goat love, Ralph Fiennes in the recent Oedipus the National when he realises that Philip Larkin was right about your parents, and now Toby Stephens at the end of this production as he is left screaming on the floor when Nora leaves. Fabulous.