By BRUCE DENNILL
A Doll’s House, Part 2 / Directed by Barbara Rubin / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
The set-up for this contemporary play – it was written in 2017 – is odd. It’s a follow-up to A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen in 1879, a serious piece that ended with its protagonist, a wife and mother named Nora, leaving her home and family, never to come back, a choice and plot twist that would have scandalised its original audience. Part 2, which sees its cast maintaining the look and feel of the original play and era in their costumes and the style of the room in which the whole piece takes place, moves much of the rest into the present, with playwright Lucas Hnath eschewing the mannered communication of the Victorian era for quickfire modern (though not in any annoying slang-related sense) dialogue.
On that foundation, director Barbara Rubin and her cast build a hugely entertaining, often hilarious and consistently thought-provoking story, with Rubin’s hand clearly detectable in the both the rapid pacing and the actors’ absolute certainty in the delivery of their lines, the gestures that accompany them and their movements to both support emotions and help in putting across their points to others.
Bianca Amato as Nora, returning home after 15 years because her hard-won independence and considerable success is at risk thanks to archaic societal rules that were as challenging for a woman in 1894 as they are now. The housekeeper who helped raise her, Anne Marie (Charlotte Butler); the man she was married to, Torvald (Zane Meas); and Emmy (Simone Neethling), one of the children she left behind are all now confronted with a woman who is not only quite different to the person who left years before but who has had time to develop her strongly-held perspectives, making her a formidable debate opponent – and a complex one, clearly processing new feelings as they arise after her return.
Amato’s performance is astounding. She’s on stage for just about the full 90 minutes of the play’s running time, and has long, dense passages of dialogue in every scene. Perhaps the best marker of how good her acting is is that the only thing that makes it feel like a performance is the costume she’s wearing. In every other way, this is a smart, opinionated, driven woman unpacking philosophies she has carefully and thoughtfully constructed in response to the prejudices and expectations she has faced because of her gender. Nora’s musings on marriage, motherhood and other roles genders are expected to play – and how those expectations can confuse, hurt and damage people – are easy to relate to, often in a way that can challenge (potentially painfully) whatever perspectives audience members came into the theatre with.
Each of the other characters is forced to face their own instinctive reactions – Nora’s return was completely unexpected – and each of Amato’s fellow cast members does a brilliant job of reflecting both the angst Nora has stirred in them and the strength of their own opinions, which may or may not be divergent.
Meas shows both the elements of Torvald that, as a husband, so exasperated Nora, and a warmth that lies beneath a man playing roles (in life) he believes he is expected to. Neethling gives Emmy a steel that might come from having to deal with feeling abandoned as a child and now being expected to accept advice from someone who has not earned the right to give it. And Butler as Anne Marie links everyone – the only person in the story who is not a member of the family and yet able to see something in all of their arguments, even after she has had to give up perhaps more than anyone to maintain a position in which she could earn a living. Butler, not often seen on stage in recent years (though a TV regular), is exceptional, and the opening scene in which Anne Marie is the first to discover Nora’s return is a masterclass from both her and Amato.
Other than the slight disconnect between the period piece appearance of the play and its potent forays into logic and ethics and morals and mores, which come across as much more current, this is a production that doesn’t put a foot wrong. It is constantly entertaining while also being profoundly interesting and stimulating, a view supported by the enthusiastic chatter in the theatre foyer after the show, with audience members discussing their own overlaps or disagreements with the characters’ views, as well as giving the cast richly deserved congratulations as they emerged from backstage.
Beautifully made, powerfully charged theatre.