by AMY BARRATT

Every once in a while, a director takes a slightly stuffy classic that you thought you knew well, turns it inside out and reveals its beating heart. Peter Hinton is such a director. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House, which opened recently at the Segal, is the current object of his X-ray vision.

Working from an early-20th-century translation by William Archer, Hinton has kept the play’s structure and sequence faithfully intact, while playing up certain plot elements and updating the language so it sounds as if it had been written in 2006 instead of 1879, and in English! Patrons of the theatre will either love or hate this bracing adaptation of the old Norwegian’s best-known work.

You know as soon as you lay eyes on Eo Sharp’s set that this will not be the Masterpiece Theatre version of A Doll House. There isn’t a hint of the dark, carved wood and heavy brocades of the 19th century. A pale, unfinished pine floor, neutral white walls with several stark white doors will serve as backdrop for all of the scenes. Six kitchen chairs are lined up on the floor just in front of the raised stage. These are never sat in, but they are turned over late in the play. As other furniture and props make their spare appearances over the course of the play, it becomes apparent that IKEA is the main inspiration for this design, if not the actual source of many of the pieces. Sweden, Norway... it’s all Scandinavia, right? It’s a cold modern set to go with the emotional chill of this modern domestic drama. Sharp’s costumes, on the other hand, are faithful to the original period, until everything starts to fall apart, that is.

Hinton’s version acknowledges that today’s audience will not respond to the characters in the same way they would have 100 or even 50 years ago. This production doesn’t build a perfect domestic scene and then proceed to destroy it; it makes Nora and Torvald’s deep dysfunction obvious to anyone with eyes, well before we learn the family secrets.

As Chris Abraham’s Hedda Gabler a few seasons back tried to show us the Nora in Hedda, this Doll House shows us the anger and intelligence of Hedda smoldering just beneath Nora’s vivacious surface. Alison Darcy’s Nora visibly winces every time Andreas Apergis as Torvald calls her “little bird” or “little squirrel.” The macaroons Nora consumes in spite of them being forbidden by her husband are both a welcome sign of rebellion and a worrying indicator of something deeply amiss.

Other actresses have been more “doll-like” as Nora. Darcy is magnificent precisely because she is a woman—not a lady, not a girl, but a flesh-and-blood woman—trapped in the life of a doll. Apergis has given Torvald a distinctive clipped speech that suggests someone who doesn’t know what would happen if ever he unclenched his teeth. He, and we, find out what happens in the second act.

Hinton’s dusting-off of the script continues with the casting of Clare Coulter as Christine Linde. An age difference between her and Nora that I at first thought would be inexplicable turns out to be perfectly supported by the text. Hinton also highlights the difference in social status between the two women that is often overlooked.

Love it or hate it—and I’m loving it—this is a Doll House that will be talked about for a long time to come.

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