A Dolls House: high quality drama, dexterously directed (From Milford Mercury)

A Dolls House: high quality drama, dexterously directed

10:48am Monday 2nd March 2009

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"I’m looking forward to this. Ibsen is always a bundle of laughs, isn’t he?”

This comment came from a chap in the audience before a performance of A Dolls House, the classic play by Henrik Ibsen at the De Valence Pavilion in Tenby.

He was being sarcastic, of course, pointing out Ibsen’s usual material - human misery in spades, by the fireside.

A Dolls House was performed by Fluellen Theatre Company, a Swansea-based drama group.

The play centres on Nora, a wife and mother with a skeleton in her closet. This guilty secret isn’t seriously naughty by today’s standards, but in 1897 when the play was written, it was heinous.

If she’d read today’s agony aunts, Nora would have admitted her crime early on, and then worked with her family to come to terms with it. But she’s prevented from doing that by her husband’s intolerant nature.

He, carrying priggishness to new heights, values respectability more than life.

Nora, who falls into the hands of a blackmailer, has an especially challenging role. Jessica Sandry, who takes it, needs to appear to her fellow actors as the happy extrovert she’s always been, while also conveying to the audience her excruciating internal torments.

The part calls for tough acting skills and Jessica has them. Like most of Ibsen’s central characters, Nora is far from perfect and her final actions outweigh the immorality that caused the trouble in the first place.

Her husband is not only a stuffed shirt and a pedant, but has some outlandish views on the role of women. He doesn’t even expect household duties, but for her merely to stand about being decorative and idiotic. Like the doll in the play’s title.

It’s a sign of how surely Huw Richards brings off this character that, despite all his despicable faults, we have sympathy for the hapless husband in the end.

Seven people appear in this high quality drama, dexterously directed by Peter Richards - and all get their demanding Ibsen roles right. There is far more going on than the lines suggest and even those seeing Dolls House for the first time would – thanks to these accomplished actors - pick up most of the hidden motives and agendas.

Gavin Dando as a disgraced banker is creepy, seedy and unscrupulous, and yet still evinces our sympathy.

While is Mrs Linde, played by Liza Ludbrook, Nora’s best friend – or a conniving enemy? Hard to tell, and that is probably what the author intended.

David Dooley, in naturalistic style, is convincing as the dying doctor. And two smaller roles: maid Geraldine Davies and porter Shaun Hughes could hardly have been done better.

There was a lot to think about in Dolls House – that’s what makes the play so famous. And even with repeated viewings, you may never take it all in But Fluellen put across this unsettling mix of unbearable indecision, guilt, revenge and the anger so competently that nobody in Tenby De Valence Pavilion – including the many pupils and students who attended – should expect to see a more satisfying version in the future.

Fluellen return to the De Valence Pavilion on May 7th with the Odd Couple, the play on which Jack Lemon based a popular film.

Malcolm Stacey

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