Jamie Lloyd’s new production of A Doll’s House (now in previews at the Hudson Theater in New York) is almost punishing in its austerity. In keeping with his minimalist approach, Lloyd places his actors, all dressed in black, on a stage equipped with chairs, but otherwise bare of scenery, props or backdrop.
There’s also a revolve, which early arriving audience members will notice at 7:45 when Nora (Jessica Chastain) appears slouched in a chair that slowly rotates for a good 20 minutes before the show proper begins. The other characters will be on and off stage, in and out of chairs, throughout the show, but Nora remains rooted to hers until the very end.
Stop reading now if you plan to see the show yourself and want to be surprised by how Lloyd stages the famous slamming door when Nora finally leaves her marriage.
This is the third in a trilogy of Jamie Lloyd productions. In 2019, Lloyd announced that his company would be producing a season of three plays: Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy, The Seagull with Emilia Clarke and A Doll’s House with Jessica Chastain. The pandemic got in the way, of course, but we now have all three. I saw Cyrano last year at BAM, The Seagull in a movie theater in November (on NT Live) and now A Doll’s House on Broadway.
All three use new translations and all strip away traditional performance practices to get at the intimate heart of each. In the case of Cyrano, as I’ve written below on this blog, the result is stunningly successful.
My reaction to The Seagull was more mixed. In his Seagull, Lloyd places the cast facing us, not each other, in a line of chairs set in the confines of a chipboard box. It’s intimate and it’s claustrophobic. Which is to say, it is, in its own way, Chekhovian.
A part of me resented Lloyd’s refusal to give us a more theatrical experience (the word “theater,” after all, comes from the Greek word “to see” and Lloyd doesn’t give us much to look at). But I also found the uniformly superb performances hypnotic and compelling, particularly Indira Varma’s self-absorbed Arkadina, Daniel Monks’s dislikable Konstantin and Emilia Clarke’s absolutely radiant Nina.
Now in A Doll’s House, I fear that Lloyd’s method obscures more than it reveals. Literally obscures, in fact, since the bleak lighting forced me to squint throughout as I tried to make out the actors’ faces.
In this production, all the other characters come and go while Nora remains stuck in her chair, sometimes stationary, sometimes slowly rotating on the revolve. As a visual indicator of a woman trapped in a stultifying marriage, it’s perfectly clear. But is it interesting or compelling beyond the conceptual level? And does it honor the arc of Nora’s experience during this play? For me, not really.
That I was able to make so little visual sense of the relationships in the play meant that I found myself anticipating the climax, asking myself, how is Lloyd going to stage the ending? Clearly, Nora will finally leave her chair but then what? There are no doors to slam here.
And Lloyd does achieve a remarkable coup de théâtre at the end. Nora finally rises from her chair and walks to the back of the stage where a loading dock door rolls up and she strides directly out onto 45th Street. It’s a fabulous moment, and the audience cheered it.
Did it make the show work? Not quite, in my opinion, but I did love the choice, the way it collapsed the distinction between drama and real life. And rather than breaking the fourth wall between audience and stage, it breaks quite a different wall. This Nora neither walks simply offstage nor walks off the stage into our presence. She exits into a lively world (honking cars and startled pedestrians!) and leaves us behind in the bleak theatrical world inhabited by her husband and family.
Brilliant critique!