Theatre reviews: Nora – A Doll’s House | The Taming of the Shrew | Scurvy Ridden Whale Men
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ON TOM Piper’s brilliant set for Stef Smith’s thrilling new 21st century perspective on the story of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, three doorframes stand between the domestic space and the outside world. For each door, there is a different version of Nora, the young wife and mother who, at the end of Ibsen’s play, famously walks through her front door and slams it, finishing the charade of the conventional marriage in which she was treated like a child and a plaything. In Smith’s vision – staged by the Citizens’ Theatre at Tramway – the first Nora, electrifyingly played by Anna Russell-Martin, is from the #metoo year of 2018, the second (Maryam Hamidi) from 1968, at the height of the sexual revolution, and the third (Molly Vevers) from 1918; yet on this dizzyingly brilliant two-hour journey through the arc of Ibsen’s story, driven by a subtly powerful musical score from Michael John McCarthy, the narrative passes between them with a strange and chilling ease, like the baton in some endlessly-repeating relay race of timeless female experience.