The Portrait of a Lady

A Doll’s House

For Catherine McCormack, or the characters she was playing, the day could hardly have been worse if she’d been married to Richard III or Fungus the Bogeyman. At the 2.30pm matinee she was Ibsen’s Nora Helmer and being terminally infantilised by Finbar Lynch’s blithely oppressive Torvald. At the 7.30pm performance she had become Henry James’s Isabel Archer and was being treated as an unsatisfactory art-object by the even nastier husband that Lynch now played: the vain, corrupt collector, Gilbert Osmond.

I’ve no compunction in revealing this, because Nicki Frei, who has adapted The Portrait of a Lady, hops boldly back and forth through time, beginning where James didn’t, at an Italian soirée, where the full unhappiness of Isabel’s marriage is evident. I’m not sure this was a wise decision, because it means we don’t see Osmond gradually reveal himself as the monster he actually is, nor observe Isabel’s growing realisation that she has been used both by him and by Niamh Cusack’s slippery, ingratiating Madame Merle, who is . . . but I won’t upset those who don’t know the book by revealing the evening’s one big surprise.

Despite those awkward jumps, the loss of tension they bring and an ending that needs fuller explanation, Frei’s script and Peter Hall’s production leave one absorbed by James’s tale of dark doings among the American expatriates who haunt the England, Florence and Rome so elegantly evoked by Peter Mumford’s back projections. And McCormack is unquestionably fine both as Isabel the ingénue who yearns for independence, travel, self-discovery and Isabel the wife who is trapped by a Pygmalion who would despise her even if she let him remodel her.

She’s still better, in A Doll’s House, as the wife that Torvald Helmer believes is already modelled to his specifications. He calls her his “songbird”, “swallow” and “flutterbug”, and she seems physically to oblige, because her arms and hands are in perpetual motion, as if Nora is auditioning for a flying role in The Birds. But this isn’t mere mannerism. McCormack is reacting to the stress of the conjugal cage and her own inner need for independence and self-discovery.

Hall stages A Doll’s House, too, and with a power and clarity that doesn’t preclude subtle moments. McCormack may begin by cramming macaroons into her mouth, but again and again a tiny emphasis or intonation suggests there’s a woman hidden inside the breathless child-wife. And that way she prepares us for what any Nora must: the most famous final exit of all.

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