A Dolls House, VCA, May 25, 1996

Written by Heinrich Ibsen

Victorian College of the Arts (Drama School) at St. Martin's Theatre, South Yarra

Reviewed around May 25, 1996

Final year drama college productions are often good but rarely this good. 

The Victorian College of the Arts production of Heinrich Ibsen's A Doll's House is an exceptional piece of naturalistic theatre directed with impeccable subtlety and detail by Grigorii Dityatkovskii, an inspired director/actor from the Maly Theatre of St. Petersburg.

The expectation, having seen Maly's Adelaide Festival shows, was for an abstract, physical interpretation. Instead, we sit close to the action in a studio environment with all the goods and chattels (including acquiescent wife) of a 19th century drawing room.

For 150 minutes we are voyeurs on the demise of this marriage between Torvald (Rodney Power) and Nora Helmer (Felicity Price). Dityatkovskii and his talented actors make ordinary moments extraordinary.

The play lives in real time. Nora opens and arranges Christmas gifts carefully. She thoughtfully decorates her tree. Torvald lights a bevy of candles. All these time-consuming activities might have tested tolerance but, in fact, allow us into their world to care about these little lives in a frighteningly intimate way.

The Norwegian Ibsen was before his time in challenging women 's role in community and marriage and was ostracised for portraying such social sacrilege on stage. Our audiences gasp at Nora's subservient ignorance and her husband's over-bearing paternalism but, to Ibsen's audience, these were acceptable and unquestioned roles.

Felicity Price has a compelling talent which penetrates Nora's emotional life. Her fluttering, childish song-bird of Act One, who is so utterly unaware of the legal and social repercussions of her forging a signature, almost imperceptibly transforms into frightened dove then woman of burgeoning self-awareness flying the coop to discover her place in the world.

Rodney Power is excellent as the bombastic, pompous Torvald. Grant Ryan is sympathetic as the pathetic Dr. Rank and Lauren Clair's sad but worldly Christina is a wonderful foil to Price's naive Nora.

This is a substantial production which earns out attention. I left the theatre enlivened and inspired by such skill in writing, direction and performance.

KATE HERBERT