The Lady from the Sea

Another updating of a classic drama that just doesn't work

In June last year, I wrote here about Benedict Andrews’ new take on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which I had seen at the Donmar Warehouse. I was reminded of that disappointing evening the other night, when I saw Simon Stone’s new version of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge Theatre. If Andrews rewrote Chekhov’s masterpiece, then Stone completely annihilated Ibsen’s text, and with it much of the original story.

During the interval, as seems to happen with remarkable regularity on our trips to the theatre these days (is this indicative of just how small the capital’s culture-devouring public is?) we bumped into an old friend we hadn’t seen for years, and during our conversation he answered my complaint about why classic dramas have endlessly to be rewritten for a modern audience with: ‘yes, but nobody would come to see it in the original’. He may well have a point.

Despite my reservations, the production has a lot going for it. The acting was very good, although I thought Andrew Lincoln was given a lesson by the remarkable Alicia Vikander, who exuded star quality. The design was interesting, although there was far too much water in the second half. With the story’s connection to the sea being underplayed to the point of desertification in the rewrite, it was also rather superfluous. In any case, how many neurosurgeons live beside Ullswater, and how many of those have swimming pools in their gardens?

To my mind, Duncan Macmillan’s 2019 updating of Rosmersholm, the play Ibsen wrote immediately before The Lady from the Sea, remains the best example of how to present a 19th century classic for a contemporary audience. If you saw it, you’ll doubtless remember the dazzling performances given by Hayley Atwell and Tom Burke. I was reminded of it when I noticed Atwell sat just along from us in the stalls. (This after spotting Emma Thompson and Greg Wise in the audience at the Harold Pinter for The Weir just a week previously. It can all get a bit distracting).

As well as (re)writing, Simon Stone also directed, and therefore was presumably fully supportive of his actors shouting their way through much of his script. Arguments between couples, and those between fathers and daughters, need not always be conducted at such decibel levels to have impact. Too often this felt like an episode of Eastenders.

And then there was the renaming of some characters and not others: one sister remains Hilde, or at least Hilda, while the other, originally Bollette, is now Asa? Lyngstrand from Ibsen’s original is now called Heath, apparently only so that Andrew Lincoln’s Edward can make a weak joke about falling asleep on Heath on a heath, not once, but twice!

The metaphysicality of Ibsen’s original was given a perfect backdrop by Lizzie Clachan’s excellent set. It was just a shame it had been thoroughly excised from the script.

But my biggest gripe is the way all such updates require the shoehorning in of every contemporary political issue: here we had climate change, the difficulties of growing up mixed race in an otherwise white environment, and even the problem of young women having to turn to Only Fans to earn enough money to get through university. Don’t get me wrong: these are all important issues, and worthy subjects for contemporary drama. So why not write a contemporary drama about them, instead of hijacking someone else’s period effort?

For me, Ibsen’s play is about the denial of equal freedoms to women in conventional marriages. While perhaps not quite as relevant today as it was back in 1888, things haven’t improved that much. But here it morphed into a story about the (apparently justified) anger of a rather traditional man in the face of his wife’s uncertainty about their relationship.

When Vikander’s Ellida expresses doubts to her husband about their marriage, the good doctor immediately suggests they ramp up her depression medication. I may have been missing something here: Stone may have been trying to make a point about how little has changed since Ibsen’s time. But if he was, it didn’t work. And I suppose it was inevitable, with so much having been changed, that the ending should also be different. Mind you, nobody in their right mind would stay with Dr Wangel as he was portrayed here.

As a third of the audience - mainly those under 40 - rose for the now obligatory standing ovation, I again caught sight of Hayley Atwell: like me, she was clapping politely, but remained in her seat.

What brought the crowds in? Well that depends on which part of the crowd you’re taking about. For us, it was Ibsen’s name, and the fact that this play is so rarely produced. The friends we bumped into admitted that as fans of This Life, they had come to see Andrew Lincoln. But for most of those under 40 it will have been the chance to see a genuine Hollywood A-lister, in Alicia Vikander. Though I must confess, as someone who barely remembers my thirties, it was her face on the poster that first attracted my eye.

I would love to see Vikander, Lincoln and the rest of this admirable cast attempt a mildly abridged, contemporary translation of Ibsen’s original text. I think they would do it very well. And I think the audience would leave with their heads full of ideas, ideas that still engaged them when they arrived home. Surely better than a brief hit of adrenaline that dissipates before you reach London Bridge Station.