Review: As Jessica Chastain orbits the stage, seated on a wooden chair, an audience sees her from all perspectives, much the way you might circle a dollhouse. Chairs and a turntable are in fact all the mise-en-scene director Jamie Lloyd provides.
Which is important because we want to savor every line. As Nora Helmer, Chastain rotates on the stage in that chair often during the performance — she’s even there as the audience enters the Hudson Theatre, where the show had its official opening Thursday night. Dressed as all the characters are, in chic, dark colors by Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash — as if they were guests at a dinner party in a SoHo loft — Nora is, it seems, on eternal display.
“So simple, and spare as a statue,” Norwegian author Alexander Kielland wrote about the script after it was published in December 1879. Lloyd, who last season brought a blazingwith James McAvoy to New York, seems to have taken that commentary to heart. The spareness of the physicality and the statue-like placement of the actors put you in mind, at times, of a production consumed with stylish minimalism.
“A Doll’s House” is concerned almost as much with money as it is with freedom. Nora’s altruistic appeal for a loan from Nils Krogstad is made to save her husband’s life. But she has skirted laws restricting what transactions women are permitted, and the consequences are too much for her image-obsessed banker husband.
Lloyd makes Chastain the lodestar in this constellation. We come to realize in our extended observation of Nora that Torvald’s infantilizing characterizations had not flattered her at all. The suspicion arises that her famous escape in the drama’s final seconds — here accomplished cleverly — is not an impulsive act at all. In Chastain’s smashingly fine-tuned performance, the march to self-discovery has been gaining momentum, scene by scene, all night.
The role completes an intriguing pairing for Chastain with the only other Broadway part she’s played: that of Catherine Sloper, in a 2012 revival of “The Heiress.” At the end of that play, Catherine shuts the front door on the man who’s after her money. In “A Doll’s House,” Nora walks out the front door, leaving the man who guaranteed her material comfort.The notion of women understanding their own power and rejecting being controlled by men remains remarkably topical.
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