Wife By Samuel Adamson ☆☆☆☆
KILN THEATRE, Kilburn
The Norwegian Feminist theorist Toril Moi once commented that the slam of the door at the end of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (1879) resounded throughout the twentieth century. Samuel Adamson’s new play explores the repercussion of that slammed door well into the twenty first century in this glorious production.
It opens in 1959, with the famous door slamming, before quickly moving backstage where the actress playing Nora, Suzannah (SIRINE SABA) is visited in her dressing room by her ex-lover, Daisy (KAREN FISHWICK) and her odious husband, Robert (JOSHUA JAMES). Daisy announces she’s pregnant, and in the next scene, set in 1988, her child is now a 28 year old gay man, Ivar (JAMES) living in Thatcher’s Britain and in love with the closeted 20 year old jail bait, Eric (CALAM LYNCH).
They’re drinking in a straight pub after seeing a production of Ibsen’s play when the actress playing Nora (SABA) walks in. Ivar waxes lyrical about Nora’s importance to gay men, the liberation she represents from patriarchal marriage now available to sexually free, out gay men living lives that challenge heteronormative standards.
Next, we move to the present day, 2019, with a gender-fluid, non-binary deconstruction of Ibsen’s play, in which Nora is played by a man (LYNCH) and her husband by a woman (SABA). It transpires that the young actor playing NORA is married to Ivar (RICHARD CANT), who is now nearly 60.
Ivar has been approached by his ex-lover, Eric’s, daughter (FISHWICK), who tells him that Eric is dead and she’d like him to attend her upcoming wedding.
For my money, the play should have ended here, but it leaps forward to 2042, and then back to 1959, and this final quarter of the play is the least successful and things get overly complex and the resonances and echoes of the various periods are rather forced and overstated. But this is a minor flaw overall and I absolutely loved this queer take on Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” that intelligently and humorously plays with the importance of Ibsen’s nonconformist message regarding the need for equality in marriage/partnerships.
Not to be missed, filled with excellent performances, most notably SABA, FISHWICK and JAMES.
Directed by Indhu Rubasingham.
Review by Jonathan KempQueerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
Labels: 2019, Jonathan Kemp, London, theater review
