The Globe and Mail - August 10, 1996

"Doll's House flawed but compelling"
Robert Cushman

WHEN he wrote A Doll's House, Ibsen created the most most potent metaphor and the most celebrated sound-effect in modern drama. The metaphor -- the one in the title -- stands for the life that Torvald Helmer, lawyer turned bank president, built for his wife Nora. He pets her, spoils her, tosses her spending-money, and implicitly denies her any moral or intellectual life of her own. The play shows Nora moving, in the course of a day and a night, from acquiescing in this existence to walking out on it. When she goes, she slams the door behind her -- a noise that invariably echoes round the theatre as, ever since the play's premiere in 1879, it has echoed round the world.

The Helmers have two small children, and the Atlantic Festival breaks new ground by giving them an actual doll's house to play with. It stands in spotlit isolation as the play begins. Then the other lights go up to reveal Nora reading her daughter a happy-ever-after fairy story whose words the little girl rapturously echoes as she leaves the stage in the custody of her nursemaid. This prologue is the production's own invention; as is its staging of the married couple's last confrontation. This is moved from the comparatively neutral territory of the drawing-room to the charged atmosphere of the bedroom. Sex is the last hold -- as it must have been the first -- that they have over one another. It's never explicitly mentioned, which may have been Ibsen's concession to his 19th-century audience. But as it plays now, Nora's refusal even to acknowledge a physical relationship is what finally crushes her husband.

At both ends of the play, this production by Helen Burns and Michael Langham both explores and enriches the text. It plays with prosaic immediacy, and also with poetic power: exactly the kind of double resonance that Ibsen's plays should possess. What goes between is more problematic; disappointingly so considering the depths and delights that the same team uncovered last year to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

By historical accident, and in defiance of the author's stated intentions, A Doll's House ranks as the most powerful of feminist tracts. But it wouldn't have that power if its heroine's situation weren't so complex. Nora is deeply implicated in her own subjection; which is what makes her breakout so impressive. She plays along with Helmer's patronizing -- with his pampering and his baby-talk -- but she is secretly resourceful beyond his wildest nightmares. Years before the play begins, she has saved his overworked life by raising the money for a long holiday. She did this by borrowing, on forged security. Now her creditor, whose own shady past is catching up with him, returns to blackmail her; and Nora is horrified to discover that feminine charm and good intentions may not be enough to sway the courts. Consciously or not, she has lived her life by manipulating men; she carries on a shamelessly flirtatious, if largely unacknowledged, relationship with a family friend, a doctor who happens to be desperately ill. Trading on his adoration is her last chance to maintain the status quo; her transformation begins when she lets it go by. So the suppressed eroticism in the last scene is as logical as it's effective.

At any given moment Megan Follows as Nora commands the stage. She is charmingly capricious, with the tunnel vision of undeviating self-absorption, in the first three-quarters of the play, and after her thunderclap conversion she rebuilds herself with an inquisitive honesty, taking nothing on trust. (Nora's strength is not so much that she sees through her husband as that she has seen through herself.) What is missing is the progression from one stage to the other. There is not much desperation; when she dances what the other characters describe as a wild tarantella, it actually seems rather tame and tentative. Nor, except when absolutely unavoidable, are there many moments of self-doubt. She acts, most of the time, at dialogue surface.

So, and more crudely, do most of her colleagues. Helmer is a prig, a scold, a moral coward complacent in his own self-righteousness; and that is what Jerry Etienne plays. But it's all he plays; and if there is no passion in Torvald -- if he does not at least believe in his own values and his own love -- the play loses much of its emotional power. The money-lending Krogstad could be a subtle compound of bitter pride and calculating self-abasement; Julian Richings plays him as Uriah Heep, with a Cockney whine that would be a cliché in a British production and is mystifyingly irrelevant here. It's hard to tell what Nora's friend Mrs. Linde (rendered by Shelley Thompson with more noise than feeling) could possibly see in him.

Only Peter Donat, as the doomed Doctor Rank, has the subtlety and authority to pass by the high standards that Wolfville, in only its second season, has already set itself. The town, the festival, the theatre are enchanting; the stage (fetchingly decked out for this show by Neil Peter Jampolis in differing shades of green) is a miniature Stratford, even more sharply focused than its progenitor. Plays leap out from it, and this comparatively early Ibsen remains ruthlessly compelling. Shuffle the relationships a bit, rob Nora of her courage and make her suicidal, and you have Hedda Gabler . That's a much later Ibsen play, and the textbooks call it greater. But they're wrong.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Variety - December 16, 1996

"A Doll's House"
Tad Simons

In his return to the Guthrie after almost two decades, former artistic director Michael Langham has engineered a version of Ibsen's tragic "A Doll's House" that ripples with humor even as it stays true to Nora's sad fate.

Langham follows the formula for success already established by the Guthrie's new artistic director, Joe Dowling: Let the Guthrie's regular company members do their adequate best in supporting roles and import superior talent for the all-important lead. Before coming to the Guthrie, Megan Follows (Anne in PBS' 1986 "Anne of Green Gables" miniseries) had already established herself as a stellar Nora in Langham's "Doll's House" at the Atlantic Theater Festival in Nova Scotia. Reviving that role here, Follows brings the kind of energy, depth and mastery of craft of which Twin Cities theatergoers have long been deprived, and, judging from the surge in box office since Dowling's appointment, for which they now appear to have an insatiable appetite.

Follows' Nora is a complex and appealing blend of naivete and intelligence, and the actress lets us revel in Nora's human side: her gluttonous craving for chocolate, her unbridled lust for money. Yet she also gives us an appreciation for Nora's higher virtues, which are grounded in love and a sense of duty. The cruel irony of the play is that these are the very values she is accused of abandoning when she leaves her husband and children.

The other appealing aspect of Follows' performance - and Langham's direction in general - is an abundance of humor, which serves as an antidote to Ibsen's dour, didactic side. From the suffocating masculinity of the set to the comical boorishness of the male characters, Langham's "Doll's House" immerses the beautiful and spirited Nora in a world where she can't possibly survive.

The Guthrie regulars provide respectable support for Follows' charming verve. As Nora's husband, Guthrie veteran Stephen Pelinski turns in a marvelously thickheaded performance that capitalizes on Torvald's almost military sense of moral superiority. At the beginning of the play, Torvald's pronouncements about honor, integrity and unimpeachable morals sound like he could have been Bob Dole's running mate. Nora's departure isn't as shocking to audiences as it once was.

Nowadays, "A Doll's House" is often thought of as one of the first tracts of feminism, precisely because it features a woman strong enough to break free from the oppressive shackles of marriage and motherhood to forge her own destiny. But "A Doll's House" is more a warning to men --- and society in general --- of what might happen if the patriarchs don't wake up and smell the coffee --- or, better yet, make the coffee. The Guthrie's production makes this point perfectly clear.

Source: Variety