Oscar-winning Swedish star Alicia Vikander makes a powerful stage debut as Ellida, a novelist haunted by her past, in this sleek, water-drenched reworking of Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 drama by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone. She’s well matched by Andrew Lincoln, making a full return to London theatre after years fighting zombies in The Walking Dead, as her older neurologist husband Edward.
This is a dense, emotionally intense and often hilarious three hours – and god knows, belly laughs aren’t common with Ibsen – marred by a certain glibness.
Everyone on stage, including Ellida’s two stepdaughters, is wildly clever, accomplished or charismatic. As he formerly did with Lorca’s Yerma and Seneca’s Phaedra, Stone rebuilt the play in rehearsal with his cast, and they’ve worked hard to create a psychological and narratively coherent modern parallel for Ibsen’s ocean-worshipping mysticism.
The fugitive sailor to whom Ellida was bound in the original here becomes a veteran environmental activist who seduced her at 15 after her father’s death, and who took the rap for an accidental killing during an oil rig protest in which she was involved. It works, but it reduces the play to being all about daddy issues.
We’re in a sumptuous house in Ullswater in the Lake District where brittle pandemonium rules. Edward has two mixed-heritage daughters, Hilda and Asa, aged 17 and twentysomething, from his first wife, who killed herself for reasons unknown. Implicit guilt over this, and his remarriage to the ethereally-cheekboned Ellida, enables the girls to rule the roost, bamboozling him into endless runs to the local shop to keep them in wine.
Just so we know that we’re firmly in the modern world rather than 19th-century Norway, the academically gifted and unremittingly sarcastic Asa is using an OnlyFans account to fund a planned PHD at Yale.
That Ellida has recently suffered a miscarriage further muddies the emotional waters. So too does the appearance of a hunky distant cousin, a poetry-quoting wannabe sculptor exhibiting symptoms of a potentially fatal disease, a combination young Hilda finds unbearably arousing. Oh, and Edward has invited his dorky but decent colleague Lyle, who was formerly in a “situationship” with Ellida and is a proxy uncle to the girls, to come and calm things down. Which is a bit like drizzling petrol on a raging fire.
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It's undeniably exciting when a star steps on stage for the first time. As well as winning an Academy Award for The Danish Girl, Vikander has been in blockbusters (Jason Bourne, Tomb Raider, The Man from UNCLE) and high-concept sci-fi (Ex Machina) but the thread running through her roles is an elusive, enigmatic quality that’s a perfect fit for Ellida. Her physical slightness and slight accent set her apart from the rest of the family as they fling F-bombs and references to Freud and Tennyson at one another.
It's a hugely exposing performance, emotionally and physically. Stone stages the play in the round on a plinth that becomes a pool of water where Ellida writhes half-naked with her former lover (Australian actor Brendan Cowell, exuding compelling menace).
There’s great intensity if not much modulation to her performance – this Ellida vibrates with high anxiety from the start. Ironically, given her apparent unknowability, Vikander is IRL a frank and open movie star, who’s spoken about miscarrying a child with her husband Michael Fassbender: it’s brave of her to go there on stage.
Lincoln impressively suggests the erosion of Edward’s complacency and goes on more of an emotional journey, and John Macmillan is dependable as ever as Lyle. Joe Alwyn brings impeccable pecs and poise to the near-impossible role of the cousin, Heath. And Vikander’s isn’t the only notable stage debut here. Isobel Akuwudike impresses mightily in her first professional role as Hilda, creating a warm and stroppy double act with the similarly talented Gracie Oddie-James – herself a relative newcomer – as Asa.
This is splashy event theatre, where star casting, the high-wire work of Simon Stone’s process, and the technical sophistication of the Bridge Theatre collide. Take it as such and you won’t be disappointed.
The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge Theatre, until November 8, bridgetheatre.co.uk.
