Flooded With Feeling: The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge Theatre

Lady from the Sea | Bridge Theatre until 8th November

Simon Stone’s Lady from the Sea floods the stage with drama

There’s been a trend of late to adapt and interpret classic plays rather than simply employ a new translation. These have been varied in success, ranging from the brilliant Robert Icke’s Oedipus to the less-than-successful Duchess of Malfi and My Master Builder.

It was with some trepidation that I approached the Bridge Theatre and this production of The Lady from the Sea, which is a lesser-performed Henrik Ibsen play that interestingly shares a character with The Master Builder. The Lady from the Sea Bridge Theatre run gives London a rare chance to see this story anew.

Ibsen’s original is a play about Ellida, the restless wife of a small-town doctor, who feels trapped far from the open sea she loves. She is haunted by a past promise to a mysterious sailor who once claimed her. When the sailor returns to claim her, she must decide whether to go with him or stay.

This version is written and directed by Simon Stone, who directed a brilliant Yerma with Billie Piper. He has quite an unusual way of developing his plays, in that they are created with the cast in the rehearsal room, which for the actors can be a really singular, unique, exciting, remarkable experience.

So what we have here is a modern reinterpretation of, not a translation, but a reinterpretation; you might call it a riff on a classic play. Here, Ellida is married to a successful doctor and mother to his two daughters from a previous marriage. She is haunted by a past relationship with a charismatic activist. When he reappears, she faces an agonising choice between the safety of her domestic life and the unfulfilled freedom, desire, and identity she left behind. She is much younger than the activist and her husband, and there are unsettling parallels between the two.

She is haunted by this relationship from her past that was potentially exploitative and abusive, and the person in that relationship has just been released from prison. As in good plays and melodramas, they turn up at the end of Act One, at which point we see things start to unravel.

Throw into the mix another character who we discover has a terminal brain condition that one of his daughters becomes obsessed with, calling it very sexy. There are unresolved themes of the anniversary suicide of the daughter’s mother and an environmental subplot. So, there are a lot of things in the mix aside from the central story of Ellida, which evolve in some very funny domestic arguments.

This production again demonstrates the amazing technical flexibility of the Bridge Theatre. This time the audience is seated; it is not a promenade like Guys and Dolls, but it is in the round, or sort of in the oblong. There is a central stage, and it looks pretty bare in the first half. The floor is white with a few chairs, a table, and a sun lounger on opposite corners.

Then in the second act it starts to morph and change. After the interval we find that everything is black, the floor is black, the furniture that was white is now black, and then a part of it drops away to be a walkway. Then it rains copiously from the roof. Then it drops down a bit to be a shallow pool to facilitate some aquatic sex, and then it drops all the way down so people can jump and dive in it and swim. Then at the very end, it rises back up to stage level.

However, you do not go to the theatre for the hydraulics. Of course there are some recognisable names in this, including Andrew Lincoln, who way back in Love Actually was also the lead character in The Walking Dead. Here he brilliantly conveys the shifts in his character, where he ultimately has to relinquish control and acknowledge the flaws in his character. Equal to him is Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander in her stage debut as his second wife, Ellida. She is superb and expertly charts her feelings and ultimately her right to determine her own destiny.

So, there are lots of things going on (almost too many), but it is a fabulous piece of contemporary drama. It is very funny. It is very moving, and in those staging moments, quite thrilling.

Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln light up this flooded reworking of Ibsen’s classic.

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