Review

Irish Times writers review the Abbey's production of Ibsen's classic, A Doll's House, and a recital by the RTE National Symphony Orchestra

A Doll's House

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

A Doll's House is the Rock Around the Clock of the theatre. Its historical importance is far greater than its quality. Henrik Ibsen's play of 1879 is a great landmark of modernity. Its protest against the infantilisation of married women echoed through the centuries and can still be heard, for example in Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Its electrifying effect on the theatre, which it re-invented as an arena for serious social commentary, spread into other forms of writing, so that in Ireland alone, it helped to shape the imaginations, not just of Shaw and O'Casey, but also of James Joyce. Its significance is so monumental that it is easy to forget the basic question: is it any good? Or, more to point, is it any good now, in a radically changed world? It's not a question that Laszlo Marton's new production at the Abbey answers with any great conviction.

Two things have happened to A Doll's House in the 125 years since it first exploded into the world. One is that it has lost all of its shock value. The story it enacts of how dutiful, bourgeois mother Nora Helmer decides to walk out on her smug husband and beautiful children was a profound affront to all established social and religious values. But now, the shock value hasn't just worn off. It has been reversed. When Nora announces at the end of the play that her primary duty is to herself, she is simply repeating today's dull orthodoxy.

The other thing that's happened has to do with theatrical form. A Doll's House was an early exercise in domestic naturalism. Yet, at this distance, we can see the play for what it is: a great artist struggling to create a form he has not yet mastered. By now we've become so used to the conventions of naturalism, largely because of Ibsen's later and much greater plays, that we can see how clunky A Doll's House really is.

This is partly a matter of mechanics. The entrances and exits are often ludicrously awkward. The imparting of information is crudely handled: Nora divulges the secret around which the plot revolves two minutes after meeting again a childhood friend she hasn't seen for a decade. But there is also a problem with the sketchiness of the supporting roles. Two of these roles - the old schoolfriend who turns up after a long time, and the husband's pal who has a sexual interest in the wife - are repeated almost precisely in Hedda Gabler a decade later. But while Mrs Elvsted and Judge Brack in the latter play are richly fascinating characters, here Mrs Linde and Dr Rank are no more than rough prototypes.

None of this means that A Doll's House can't be staged now, but it does mean that it can't be staged simply as a great classic. It demands a production that has a very precise sense of what it wants to say in the here-and-now. Laszlo Marton, who did such a fine job with The Wild Duck at the Peacock in 2003, never really manages to articulate a central idea. What we get instead is a variety of approaches that are often suggestive in themselves but that don't quite cohere.

One half-developed suggestion is that when Nora's priggish husband Torvald suggests she is out of her mind, he might actually be right. Hannah Yelland plays Nora as a personality that has yet to be formed and that therefore veers wildly between extremes, from coldly bored to teasingly sexual, from monstrously egotistical to blankly void, from coolly manipulative to timidly submissive. This notion of derangement is both intelligent and courageous and it results in some superb moments, as when Yelland dances like a frantic mechanical scarecrow. But it needs to be supported by a rather braver, starker production than Marton is willing to risk.

Again, there are suggestions that he had one in mind. At times, he seems to decide that the play is not naturalistic at all, but is instead a melodrama - a point that is sometimes made explicit in Thomas Hase's lighting. But the notion is not followed through with any consistency, as the production hovers uneasily between reverence for a supposed classic and a wilder, freer attitude. This is a pity, because, aside from Yelland's evident willingness to push the boat out and Phelim Drew's richly suggestive performance as the would-be blackmailer Krogstad, there is some brilliant work from Owen McDonnell as Helmer. His shifts from monstrous self-satisfaction to stunned abjection are almost enough to suggest that this is a play, not about the wife, but about the husband. That, if developed, might have been the fresh angle of vision that could renew a creaking play.

Until May 28

Fintan O'Toole

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Dowdall, RTÉ NSO/Houlihan

NCH, Dublin

Rhona Clarke - Everything Passes. Takemitsu -

I hear the water dreaming. Rhona Clarke - Where the Clouds Go. Michael Alcorn - Synapse. Pascal Dusapin - Apex

The RTÉ contemporary music series Horizons 2005 concluded with a concert devised by the Dublin-born composer Rhona Clarke.

Her five contrasted selections were all composed within the past 20 years, and they illustrated the multi-faceted yet pervading significance of extra-musical ideas in today's orchestral repertory.

Pascal Dusapin's Apex is the third of four works he has dubbed with the oxymoron "solo for orchestra". Here, sounds surge and recede, with each high point - or apex - being marked by the introduction of some new or contrasting sound.

If this technical brief suggests wave forms, then the broad picture was a grey, forbidding seascape with never a sail on the horizon.

The gentler aquatics of Takemitsu's I Hear the Water Dreaming were much more engaging, even though this performance might have flowed with a little more freedom.

Robert Houlihan nonetheless elicited a sympathetic accompaniment to William Dowdall's delicately nuanced solo flute playing in this self-consciously impressionistic oriental reverie.

For Rhona Clarke, impressionism works in reverse: the music suggests the idea, not the idea the music. Everything Passes is thus an apt name for a lightly scored, compact work in which no particular mood prevails. And there could hardly be a more fitting title than Where the Clouds Go for a symphonic idyll that seemed as unpremeditated as the weather itself.

With Michael Alcorn, however, cerebration came to the fore in Synapse, a piece that takes its cue from the physiology of the brain. Sonic interactions replicate neural interactions, producing a psychedelic fizz in which the orchestra blends happily with live electronics that are partly sampled, partly composed, and partly random, and were coordinated with sensitivity by Alcorn himself.

And his cunning instrumental writing, clearly relished by the RTÉNSO, testified to a hardy musicality that, elsewhere in Rhona Clarke's programme of modern and post-modern tone poetry, was conspicuous by its absence.

Andrew Johnstone