Ibsen can benefit from a change of scene. By transposing the action of this play from 19th-century Norway to a Caribbean island in the 1950s, Elinor Cook’s new version clarifies a familiar text and Kwame Kwei-Armah, soon to take over the helm at the Young Vic, directs it with great panache. Yet as the play rushed past – 100 minutes with no interval – a few nagging doubts began to appear.
Cook stays true to the play’s central dilemma: the conflict in the mermaid-like Ellida Wangel between her duty to her devoted doctor husband (played by Finbar Lynch) and her attraction to a mysterious, seagoing Stranger (played by Jake Fairbrother) to whom she was once betrothed. Shifting the story to the Caribbean also does nothing to diminish its potency. Ellida, like most of the characters, feels trapped in an island paradise with the sea as the only escape route.
Cook has updated the dialogue with a good deal of ingenuity. Where Ellida, in Michael Meyer’s translation, looks longingly at a big steamer called The Englander, in this version she fantasises about a glamorous yacht owned by a famous Hollywood actor. In Ibsen her bookish stepdaughter, Bolette, dreams of flight in the vaguest terms; here she is offered the tantalising prospect of punting on the river at Oxford in a jaunty boater.
Everything here is clear and precise and Nikki Amuka-Bird captures the amphibious nature of Ellida, who is first seen clambering over rocks in a bathing suit and whose instinctive reaction to a crisis is to jump into a standing pool on Tom Scutt’s watery set. Amuka-Bird is particularly good at suggesting that Ellida, while living in a recollected dream, has a sharp-witted contempt for a modern marriage ceremony that reduces women to chattels.
Kwei-Armah’s production is excellently acted but goes at such a lick that situations don’t always have room to breathe. A classic case is the amazing scene between Bolette and her former tutor, where a disinterested offer of help turns into a marriage proposal. (I have a distant memory of a very young Vanessa Redgrave – long before she went on to play Ellida – moving in that scene from bright-eyed excitement to weary resignation.) Helena Wilson is here not given time to explore the character’s violent fluctuations of mood.
There is fine work from Tom McKay as the lonely ex-tutor, Finbar Lynch as the bewildered Dr Wangel, Ellie Bamber as his mischievous daughter Hilde – whom we meet later in The Master Builder – and Jonny Holden as a sickly sculptor. It’s a good evening without quite hitting you, as great Ibsens do, between wind and water.
• At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 2 December. Box office: 020-3282 3808.
