Hailey Gillis Captivates in Canadian Stage’s Tense and Revelatory “A Doll’s House” – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Toronto Theatre Review: Canadian Stage’s A Doll’s House

By Ross

A reformulation chirps wisely and wonderfully inside Canadian Stage’s Bluma Appel Theatre, bringing renewed depth, urgency, and emotional precision to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House through Amy Herzog’s lucid and purposeful adaptation. What first appears modest quickly reveals its intent. Herzog pares the text with intelligence and confidence, allowing language, structure, and silence to carry the weight rather than spectacle. Under Brendan Healy’s strong, tense, and evocative direction, the production leans into a traditional theatrical frame while sharpening the play’s modern relevance and playing field. This approach proves especially striking for viewers familiar with Jamie Lloyd’s stark and strong Broadway revival that starred Jessica Chastain, offering not a retreat from that production’s superb severity but a re-engagement and re-alignment through density, atmosphere, and psychological pressure.

The evening opens with a maze of wooden chairs scattered about against a backdrop of lush crimson curtains. It’s a composed yet unmistakably stifling image that signals containment, ritual, and repetition. This is a house that looks beautiful but breathes poorly, suffocating under its own weight and stuffy heat, and that contradiction fuels the production’s emotional tightening. At the center of it all stands the impressive Hailey Gillis as Nora, delivering a captivating, honest, and deeply transformational performance. Gillis (Soulpepper’s Octet) plays Nora as a woman intoxicated by affection, approval, and performance, fluttering with nervous energy and irreverent charm, unaware of the cage that quietly shapes and controls her life.

Her delivery is smart, playful, and emotionally agile, becoming increasingly gut-wrenching as the cost of Nora’s denial comes more clearly into focus. Gillis allows us to see Nora’s intense contradictions without judgment, revealing how love, fear, and selfishness coexist within her. Opposite her stands Gray Powell (Coal Mine’s Appropriate), offering up a Torvald who is tight, solid, superficially affectionate, and chillingly assured. His misogyny is not overtly cruel but embedded in certainty and paternal pride. That obliviousness makes it all the more unsettling and disturbing for a modern audience to hear, easily exposing how oppression disguises itself as care within partnership.

Healy’s direction deftly amplifies this psychological tension, using the wide open set and blocking to create a sense of claustrophobia that steadily tightens its caged grip. Gillian Gallow’s set and costumes drape powerfully to this effect. The room suggests comfort and taste but resists specificity, hovering somewhere between dining room and sitting room, reinforcing the sense that this is a space designed more for display than for actually living and engaging. It becomes something akin to a pressure chamber, beautiful but absolutely confining, stifling, and cold, when we should be feeling its warmth. Gallow’s costumes are particularly effective, underscoring the changing themes of containment and female liberation through texture, structure, and color, culminating in a visual transformation that mirrors Nora’s internal awakening. The lighting by Kevin Lamotte (Shaw’s GNIT) subtly and artfully sculpts the emotional terrain, while Deanna H. Choi’s sound design is oppressively amplified, occasionally missing opportunities to deepen our access to the characters’ quiet inner lives, particularly in moments that rely on silence and restraint rather than escalation.

The supporting cast is exceptional, providing essential grounding and texture. Jamie Robinson (YPT’s Risky Phil) brings quiet menace and moral human weight to Krogstad, never overstating the threat yet allowing it to loom persistently. The invigorating Laura Condlln (Stratford’s Frankenstein Revived) is precise and emotionally generous as Kristine, and her scenes with Robinson carry a sense of earned intimacy and reckoning that resonates deeply. Their final exchange is one of the production’s most affecting moments, offering a glimpse of a connection forged through honesty rather than illusion. David Collins (Stratford’s London Assurance) gives Dr. Rank a gentle gravity, speaking of illness and isolation with understated grace, while Elizabeth Saunders (CS’s The Stone Angel) brings warmth and fatigue to Anne Marie, anchoring the household’s generational divide with lived-in truth.

When the final confrontation arrives, Gillis allows Nora’s transformation to register with striking clarity. The shift is subtle but unmistakable, visible in stillness, posture, and focus rather than volume or gesture. While the final exit famously associated with seismic rupture arrives here without a literal slam, unlike that powerful and unique stage exit delivered by Chastain and Lloyd on Broadway, the emotional impact remains potent. The door closes gently, but the reckoning has already occurred. This choice reframes the ending not as an explosion but as an inevitability, a woman stepping into self-definition with quiet resolve. In doing so, Canadian Stage’s A Doll’s House offers a deeply relevant and emotionally stirring examination of female identity and societal expectation. The production proves that this story still speaks urgently to the present moment, earning its place by trusting Herzog’s adaptation and its performers to articulate why it still matters now. The bird may not shatter the cage on her way out, but we understand why she must leave, and that understanding resonates long after the red curtains come down.