The Lady From The Sea review: A mixed take on Ibsen's classic

Kwame Kwei-Armah’s recent appointment to run the Young Vic has rightly met with warm enthusiasm. He takes up the job next year, and here gives a taste of the sort of work he might stage there, tackling Henrik Ibsen’s classic vision of a woman torn between duty and freedom.

Elinor Cook’s new version of the play is set not in Ibsen’s nineteenth-century Norway, but on a Caribbean island in the Fifties. While the atmosphere could be more ripe and sultry, there’s a clear sense of the social constraints of provincial life as well as its Freudian undercurrents.

Nikki Amuka-Bird, recently on the big screen in The Children Act and on TV in an adaptation of Zadie Smith’s NW, is the conflicted Ellida. She feels stifled by her marriage to protective, puzzled Wangel (Finbar Lynch). The sea seems to call her and she’s nagged by thoughts of a former lover. Amuka-Bird captures her haunted and distracted manner — and also the loyalty that curbs her craving for escape.

She’s surrounded by troubled characters. One stepdaughter, Ellie Bamber’s Hilde, is snarky and destructive, while the other, Helena Wilson’s Bolette, is trapped and easily coerced. Lyngstrand, an artist, is fatally sick. The apparently placid teacher Arnholm is in fact a brute.

The psychology of these relationships is nicely judged, and the result is a solid production that raises some timely questions about gender roles and the nature of marriage. Yet the play remains a tricky blend of realism and feverish symbolism, and in avoiding the operatic excesses that often bedevil richly lyrical interpretations, it ends up feeling oddly sexless. There’s quiet passion, but not enough mystery or panache.

Until Dec 2 (020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com)