Yesterday it was five years since A Doll’s House played its last show in London (a performance I was lucky enough to attend). Five years later that show feels no less nerve-shredding, tear-jerking, real, inspiring.
I truly believe that art can change your life, perhaps none more so than theatre – that brief time within touching distance of great dramatic figures.
Sometimes the impact is obvious. You see a show about a Doctor and apply to medical school, see Mark Rylance and apply to RADA, see a musician and pick up an instrument, see a Chekhov and go to Russia, see something political and campaign for change. You study theatre. You learn something new. We all have that first show that’s our first love. Of course these are “life-changing”.
But I believe that an encounter with great theatre is like a brief encounter with a mystery soulmate, gone afterwards but never forgotten – that one show like a lost love for you. It’s subtler, gentler, but no less powerful and always there. There’s such connection in that one moment that, years down the line, you can’t help but think back on it, call on it for help, love it. When life lobs big decisions your way, you’re inspired by friends, family, advice, experience – and those encounters, and that show.
I’m lucky to have a list of ten or twenty shows that stopped my heart and opened my eyes – cinematic inner lives in The Flick's small talk; Black Watch; the inevitable tragedy in everyday work in A View from the Bridge; all the encounters within The Encounter; the people places and things of Barbra Marten and Jeremy Herrin and Duncan Macmillan and Denise Gough; the Wooster Group’s one good show Gatz; the love letters redefining theatre of Farinelli and the King, Chekhov’s First Play, and Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins. Oblique Ostermeier and Lisa Dwan and Pinter; also Les Mis. Plenty more. SEE CHEKHOV’S FIRST PLAY.
It still goes on – just this year Fun Home gave voice to our unvoiced repressions; last year guess which seven hour epic still unfolds? For all the crap, and the majority of mediocrities, just one show a year like this – maybe even one moment – and that makes it all worthwhile. What will be next year’s?
But there are those certain shows that speak as if only to you – years later, these nights are key parts of your life. My other one/three is The Shakespeare Trilogy. Superb shows – Caesar so strong about control and revenge, Tempest so strong about imprisonment and redemption – these redefined who Shakespeare speaks for and who theatre belongs to, with brio and bravado and genius. Hannah’s ongoing imprisonment, brought new meaning by the Bard, will stay with me to my dying day. And over almost five years, a unique way of storytelling...
And sod it, I loved loved loved loved loved Nell Gwynn and secretly it’s still my favourite show ever. Heartfelt and hilarious song-and-dances don’t stay with you unless they say and mean something; Nell Gwynn said and meant so much. And a dog too!
But the first time I saw A Doll’s House I stumbled out as if winded, whilst the second time I stumbled out fully knowing this show was a part of my life. Why? There aren’t words; there was everything there. I’d read it before so it’s not just Ibsen. It’s the richness Stephens’ speech had; the baby; the faux-familial set later a cage, a boxing ring, a carousel; Nora’s dance; the humanity Cracknell brought to everyone’s smallest moments; the ignorant sensitivity of Krogstad and Torvald’s performances; Act III; Hattie Morahan…
Whatever the reason, whatever the objective merits of the show, there’s something more – far more subjective, instinctive, absolute. I truly believe I’ve taken paths in life – outside the glitzy West End, regarding people I love and places I’m at – because of the shows that linger in my life. In the last five years five years of life has happened, and there’ve been times when I’ve been unconsciously imitating old shows, and decisions deliberately influenced by the domestic façade the Helmers put on or by Nora’s tentative self-aware semi-courage. When I say the show changed my life, I mean that.
Alan Bennett wrote “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Personally I think that in theatre – where the dead awaken and that hand is reaching out in front of you, before the moment is lost forever – that feeling will always be more poignant, more profound, and more personal. I’ve seen some great shows – and of course A Doll’s House is a technically great show – but moments like this, particular to you? For you, I hope there’s at least one. For me, it’s this.
Anywho, this is a long-winded and extremely pretentious way of saying that the greatest show produced in my lifetime is wonder.land A Doll’s House.
