A DOLL’S HOUSE

Almeida Theatre

★★★★

“the performances are solid and nuanced”

At one point, Nora, drowning in debt and deception, dances in a sexy nurse outfit for her husband and her best friend – two birds with one stone.

Spoiler alert: it is a profoundly unsexy moment. Nora is too freighted with distress to be a fantasy figure, the men too bovine in their strangled lusts to be enchanted.

Real life intrudes and breaks down the illusion into its humdrum parts.

Besides, Nora is too smart to surrender to the pretence. That, in miniature, is the problem she is trying to outrun: life as performance.

Anya Reiss’s update of A Doll’s House places Nora and Torvald in the upper tiers of London finance, where the money is large, the margins tight, and the optics everything.

They are on the cusp of cashing out but the deal is not yet done. Until then, they are living as if the millions are already in the bank. The house is full of Christmas credit card sprees and the mood just shy of panic.

The plot does not need much adjustment from Henrik Ibsen’s original, except that here the women are more clearly the authors of their own misfortune. Nora has committed a financial crime to keep her husband afloat through addiction and recovery. Her husband doesn’t know. It would ruin him. Nils, an employee with a precarious foothold on his own life, opts for blackmail. From there, the screws tighten in familiar ways.

Romola Garai plays ersatz yummy mummy Nora as someone always a fraction ahead of herself but gaining no advantage from the foreknowledge. She dominates the play. Her performance is agitated and magnetic, managing not just her secret but the version of herself that makes the rest of this fakery possible.

Tom Mothersdale’s Torvald is all nervous control. His authority rests on things continuing to go well. He is a man clinging to love, money and illusion with desperation rather than joy. His history of addiction is not overplayed, but it colours everything, especially his hostility to James Corrigan’s Nils. Corrigan gives Nils a sweaty directness the others often avoid. He knows what he wants and says so, where the rest sustain the lie for as long as the lie remains viable.

Reiss threads in contemporary detail. They live on their phones, sealed in a kind of high-end white bunker, with real life kept at bay. Their only connections are via Instagram. The children remain offstage, heard but not seen, and at one point Nora frets that she is simply performing motherhood via FaceTime.

Around the central pair, the performances are solid and nuanced. Thalissa Teixeira’s downbeat Kristine – the most sympathetic in a parade of slithering grotesques – offers a steadier presence and some semblance of hope. Olivier Huband’s Petter Rank, who lusts after Nora, is mostly insufferable.

Director Joe Hill-Gibbins ensures the drama builds cleanly. By the final confrontation, when Nora has no choice but to tell Torvald the truth, there is nothing left to hide behind. The resolution misfires somewhat – the tone all over the place – which leads to deflation rather than explosion.

What remains, however, is a sense of drenching anxiety. This is Snakes on a Plane for the banking set.

A DOLL’S HOUSE

Almeida Theatre

Reviewed on 9th April 2026

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Marc Brenner

A DOLL’S HOUSE

★★★★

“a compelling evening”

Is Peer Gynt a play or a poem? When Henrik Ibsen first published his five-act verse drama, Peer Gynt attracted widespread criticism from contemporary figures for its complete disregard of conventional stagecraft and its blend of fantasy and realism. Defending his work, particularly from the hostility of theatre critic Clemens Petersen, Ibsen declared that it ‘is poetry; and if it isn’t, it will become such’.

In the hands of Kåre Conradi, there can be no doubt. He breaks a few conventions himself in his rendition of Peer Gynt’s story, delivering it partly as narrative, partly as lecture, partly in English and partly in his native Norwegian. But what starts as a gentle folk tale of everyday life and the journey of a worthless nobody – albeit with a gift for seducing women – turns into a tense saga that at its heart addresses the eternal question of being and self.

Conradi is something of a polymath in the dramatic world. He is a celebrated stage, screen and television actor, and the founder and artistic director of the Norwegian Ibsen Company. A graduate of the Norwegian Theatre Academy and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), he is familiar with Shakespeare as much as Ibsen. He appeared in the TV series Shetland, and stars in the historical comedy Norsemen, on Netflix. For this evening, he took on the roles of producer, writer/adapter and performer.

Peer Gynt the person is hard to like. He is feckless and reckless. He is an egotist with charm and ambition, but doesn’t want to work hard. He uses women in a way that might have them joining them “MeToo” movement these days. He abandons his poor mother and runs away to, notably, Arabia, when life gets a bit too hot for him in Norway. When he returns as an old man, he finally comes face to face with himself in a fantasy during which he is being brought to account for his life. But through all this, he has retained the adoration of the long suffering Solveig. It is she in the end who answers the questions of self and rescues him from eternal perdition.

But he is also an ‘Everyman’ in whom we might see reflections of ourselves. Conradi first encountered Peer Gynt aged 17 and over the years has developed a deep connection to the character. He brings him to us in a monologue on a simple spotlit stage lasting just over an hour. During this time he switches effortlessly from storyteller to actor; sometimes, in the latter persona passionately proclaiming his justification for just ‘being himself’; sometimes skilfully lacing together the characters of the story. Then, as narrator, he will make a humorous aside aimed at a 21st century audience. He avoids declamation (at one moment he catches himself overacting) and he drops suddenly into a linguistic to and fro – often, it was hard to tell whether he was talking in English or Norwegian.

What began as – potentially – a challenging hour, soon became a compelling evening, thanks to Conradi’s gifts. This was a bravura performance, with poetry at its core.

Tag Archives: Henrik Ibsen

A DOLL’S HOUSE

★★★★

Almeida Theatre

A DOLL’S HOUSE

Almeida Theatre

★★★★

“the performances are solid and nuanced”