Negative incapability: Belvoir’s Nora

Ibsen’s work has been getting a bit of an airing in Sydney in the past eight weeks: first, Hedda Gabler at Belvoir, then Sport for Jove’s A Doll’s House at the Seymour Centre, and now Nora, a sequel of sorts to A Doll’s House, also at Belvoir. Not helped by inevitable comparisons between it and Adena Jacobs’ Hedda Gabler which immediately preceded it in the same space, Nora – written by Kit Brookman and Anne-Louise Sarks – is the story of Ibsen’s eponymous character after she leaves the doll’s house and ventures forth of her own accord.

Set on a blank black stage with the rooms and walls of the Helmer’s house made from wooden frames criss-crossing it like a modern flat-pack labyrinth, we first see Torvald sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, while Nora reads stories in their children’s room. Lit in pools of bright and golden light, there is a darkness and a shadowyness to the rest of house, a suffocating claustrophobia which harkens back to Ibsen’s play, and it seems that this time around, following Hedda Gabler at least, there is to be more Ibsen and more of a sense of restriction.

Miracles don’t happen everyday: Sport for Jove’s A Doll’s House

Ibsen’s work is going through a bit of a renaissance in Australia at the moment. To be more accurate, specifically A Doll’s House. Presented here by Sport for Jove at the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre, A Doll’s House will also be seen at La Boite in Brisbane in September (in a new version by Lally Katz), as well as in Nora, a ‘sequel’ of sorts, at Belvoir in August, written by Kit Brookman & Anne-Louise Sarks.

In Sport for Jove’s production, director Adam Cook has stressed the period setting and location of Ibsen’s text as being crucial to the play’s success and impact. “We read or watch this play and think, well, here is a recognisable character, a recognisable woman… There’s a richer dialogue to be had with our own times if you set the play in its original period, prompting us to wonder if we really treat each other any differently today, have we evolved in our thinking at all?” It’s an important question, though (unfortunately) I don’t think Cook’s production comes close to answering it.

Hedda, garbled: Belvoir’s Hedda Gabler

The role of a reviewer, John McCallum has said (quoting Katherine Brisbane), is to articulate why a team of people have spent upwards of six months of their lives bringing this play (or this version of a play) to the stage, and communicate it to an audience. Additionally, the role of a reviewer is to comment on a production, on its strengths and weaknesses, to review a production in all its nuances. I write reviews because I find it the most effective way to record my thoughts about a production and because, as John McCallum so eloquently said in his Philip Parson’s speech in 2010, I’ve been “theatre-fucked” and I want to share the experience with others, encourage them to be “theatre-fucked” too. Favourable reviews are only written when a production deserves it (you can find a selection of them on this site) and they are always a challenge because you can’t say everything; your average review is the most common, but is no less easy or hard for being so – the bad things mustn’t outweigh the good, but the good things can soften the bad. Unfavourable reviews are perhaps the hardest to write because of the time investment that Brisbane-via-McCallum talked about, because I don’t believe that any production is ever truly ‘bad’.