Review: A Doll’s House, The Crucible, Sheffield

For all that feminism has given and empowered, must not women still shapeshift through life to advance themselves – protect themselves – in what ultimately remains a man’s world?

The 1879 play – which shocked audiences then for its defiance of gender expectations, and remains shocking now, if only as a study in how little has changed – has been adapted for this new season Crucible production by the peerless Chris Bush (Standing at the Sky’s Edge / Rock Paper Scissors / Fantastically Great Women), in yet another triumphant outing for Sheffield Theatres.

The story opens on Christmas Eve, in the home of Nora Helmer and her buttoned-up husband Torvald, with Nora in frivolous happy housewife mode.

She has been shopping, excitedly splashing the cash her husband’s top new bank job will bring – and they’re for all the world the self-satisfied middle-class family.

But the discomfiting truths start early. Torvald’s patronising pet names for his wife – ‘my little squirrel’, ‘my little songbird’ – are really just misogynistic micro-aggressions to keep her in her place.

When he forces macarons into her mouth, one after another, as a ‘jokey’ sanction for her hiding the secret treats from him, it’s nothing short of violation, despite her awkward giggles of self-preservation.

BAFTA-nominated Siena Kelly is outstanding as Nora, not just for remembering such an incredible amount of dialogue from a character who never leaves the stage throughout the two hours and 45 minutes of the play.

As Nora’s story unravels, so too do appearances – Kelly slips between class accents, behaviours, and incarnations with the practised ease of any woman who’s been used to having to do exactly that all her life.

Nora must mould and remould herself constantly depending on the power balance of the company she keeps: wife, mother, plaything, friend; subservient, sexy, flirtatious, chaste; sometimes wily, sometimes coy, always self-sacrificing and subordinate, never once allowing what she might want or feel to rise to the fore.

Even with Dr Rank, kind confidant that he may be, Nora cannot be an equal – he shatters the facade of pure friendship by revealing he has desired her all along.

Thanks to Bush’s refreshed dialogue, not so much a contemporary take on the original but rather ‘scrubbed of extraneous 19th century waffle’ as she herself puts it, there’s unexpected ironic comedy in the script.

The actors, though dressed authentically in the period costume of Victorian era Norway, speak naturally, almost casually, their lines tumbling over and interrupting each others’ as any normal 21st century conversation would.

It’s a laugh-out-loud moment when Nora marvels, incredulous, at her husband’s naivety in believing she was making paper Christmas decorations for weeks – and, again, when Torvald explains with arrogant distaste that his dislike for Krogstad stems partly from the fact ‘he calls me mate’.

But there are moments which, despite the laughter of the audience especially in the climactic second half, it is uncomfortably hard to find humorous.

Torvald’s about-turn after revealing what he really thinks of Nora – Tom Glenister does a nauseating line in weasly pleading – is nothing short of sickening.

And a genius set by Chiara Stephenson, combined with lighting design by Richard Howell, keeps things fittingly sinister.

The Helmers’ traditional Norwegian wooden house is not so much a gilded cage as a veritable prison, the vertical shiplap doubling as grey prison bars.

As Nora paces constantly about the suffocating house she is an inmate in an exercise yard, disquieting shadows dancing on the paper-thin walls.

• A Doll’s House, The Crucible, Sheffield, until Saturday, October 12