Barbie’ll blow you back
23.03.2016
A pink pop explosion of power play. Standard Bank Young Artist Christiaan Olwagen takes Henrik Ibsen’s Norwegian realism and wrings it into a post-modern mash spiced with expressionism to create A Doll’s House that hits you like a slammed door.
It took me awhile to realise what was happening. The acting is overcooked from when Jennifer Steyn as Nora steps into the comfortable lounge backdropped by pressed wood flats with nothing but handle-less doors to relieve their plainness. She dances wildly, talks rapidly, over emphasises a wide range of emotion, setting off like a long play record incorrectly set on 45rpm. The pitch drops a notch or two when her husband Torvald, played by Marin le Maitre, steps in, and when Dawid Minaar slithers into the room. Yet even these two, one pragmatic and indulgent, the other sleazy and cynical, are unable to tone down the sense of fraught energy, especially when Rob van Vuuren bursts in as the freaked out Krogstad who is so desperate to maintain his hard-won respectability that he appears on the verge of breakdown.
At first it seemed as if Olwagen had mistaken frenzy for emotional intensity until it became a vocabulary on its own, with Steyn being the dictionary from which all else took its meaning, with the measured depth I’d been searching for finally revealed in the plot’s climax, fantastically inverting the usual sense of pace.
Although the entire cast, including Anthea Thompson who fills out the frumpy role of Nora’s friend Mrs Linde, are fantastic, it is Steyn upon whom the entire tone of this production is set, whipping it, whipping us, into a froth that she eventually blows away in rebellion with a fantastic accusatorial: “YOU CALLED ME HELPLESS”. Four words that both sum up her entire life and blast open the doors to a new self.
Rocco Pool’s bizarre yet perfectly complete set that seems to open and close by itself, and Birrie le Roux’s costuming which turn Steyn from elegant to brash to comic and finally, to pragmatic while the other characters remain in their dull-draped roles, serve to further place the emphasis on Nora’s dilemma. Everything points to her, and she not only manages the expectations, she wiggles her ass and dances upon them with abandon.
It is an adaptation that brings Ibsen’s 19th Century domestic realism up to speed with a world that embraces mobile connectivity, materialism and Nicky Minaj et al. Playing the Norwegian straight to a contemporary audience runs the risk of dreariness and the cobwebs are blown away by Olwagen who dispenses with extraneous characters such as the maid and nursemaid and puts Nora’s children offstage as young adults getting on with their own lives somewhere else. What he manages to keep is the still entirely relevant dynamics of Thorvald’s suppression of his wife Nora’s sense of capability.
The modern term, I believe, is gaslighting, and it is the very modern development of Facebook that enlightened me to this.
Clicking on some link I initially thought might have something to do with illumination, I discovered gaslighting refers to the psychological darkness of having your own reality overshadowed by an emotionally abusive partner. The endgame is that your own perception is replaced by their perception, which reflects negatively on your own abilities and sense of self.
This little drive-through titbit proved useful in throwing light on Nora’s situation. Not that gaslighting was a term when Ibsen was alive. Back then it was matter of a husband dominating his wife by undermining her character with endearments and unflattering statements delivered flatteringly.
Endearments such as ‘my little spreegull’ and ‘my little bird’ which serve to both objectify and belittle under the guise of loving playfulness. Ah, how fine the line between tenderness and manipulation.
There is a wonderfully witty interplay between script and action, sometimes reinforcing each other, often acting as counterpoint (“You are still my wife.” “Here, take your ring.”) which the actors wield with great, if not perfect, timing to make this work fizz with tension like a hot pink flashing neon light.
You’ve got tonight and tomorrow to see this version of A Doll’s House at the Baxter Theatre. Go! — Steve Kretzmann
Book online at www.computicket.com or at any Shoprite Checkers outlet.