"The production brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged yet complex family at its heart that seems to be slowly drowning: Ellida (Vikander), as the young, second wife of neurologist Edward (Lincoln), is caught between life with her husband and a long lost, formative ex-lover, Finn (Brendan Cowell), who makes a reappearance. Ellida's stepdaughters, Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James), are trying to stay afloat amid grief for their biological mother, who killed herself."
"Where that mix of the comic, domestic and tragic grated in his recent Phaedra, here the ridiculously OTT family rows offset the razor-sharp tension of Vikander and Lincoln's deeply felt performances. Vikander does not pull back from her character's exposure while Lincoln is a pained alpha male forced to cede control and made vulnerable. The question of female free will, pivotal to so many of Ibsen's plays, is key in the original: Ellida is granted her freedom by Edward."
Simon Stone delivers a high-octane, modernised staging that removes mystical sea elements and replaces them with sharply lit realism focused on a privileged, troubled family. Ellida, a young second wife, is torn between the security of her neurologist husband and a reappearing former lover who embodies passion and activism. Two stepdaughters grieve their mother’s suicide while family rows oscillate between overblown angst and heightened humour. The production balances psychological intensity with comic excess, foregrounds Vikander’s exposure and Lincoln’s vulnerable alpha, and centres questions of female free will, consent, responsibility and conflicting ideologies in love.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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