REVIEW: Canadian Stage’s A Doll’s House weighs the burden of our inherited roles, Theater News

Every theatre is a dollhouse, but not every play wants you to know that. Brendan Healy’s succinct, lush production of Amy Herzog’s 2023 adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic A Doll’s House doesn’t beg suspension of disbelief. Rather the opposite, never letting us forget that this f*cking play is about us.

Wine-coloured velvet curtains part to reveal a skewed, funereal sitting room, hedged in on all sides by more draped and scalloped red velvet curtains. It’s Christmas, and a giddy Nora (Hailey Gillis) shows her walrus-y husband Torvald (Gray Powell) the items she’s bought, on sale mind you, for their children. Eight years a husband, Torvald addresses his wife as if she were a simple yet delightful child, scolding her over-spending and taste for sweet treats. Nora giggles and flirts and tries to coax a little more cash from her newly-promoted-at-the-bank husband. As a celebrating couple at a celebratory time of year, Gillis and Powell are both very quick, very funny, and just the right amount of sickening.

Nora, saddled with everything and nothing to do, sweeps around the sitting room in a frothy red dress: rearranging one of designer Gillian Gallow’s eight wooden chairs, fussing with a tabletop Christmas tree, and generally living up to Torvald’s frequent “little bird” allegations. A sense of dread washes in with the holiday tidings on the arrival of Kristine (an excellent, touching Laura Condlln), Nora’s old school friend, now widowed and seeking work. In private conversation, Nora brags of a debt she’s taken on to support her blissfully ignorant husband, a secret she holds with pride. Neither secret nor pride are set to last. 

Nora and Torvald are each shadowed by the desperate figures of Kristine and disgraced lawyer Krogstad (a softly threatening Jamie Robinson). The cast of characters is rounded out by family friend Dr. Rank (a mordantly funny David Collins) and Anne-Marie (a serene Elizabeth Saunders). Nora’s unsentimental former nanny, Anne-Marie now cares for the couple’s two young children, Ivar and Emmy (the charming Athan Giazitzidis and Vera Deodato). 

Healy’s pacing of Herzog’s lean script is swift and dynamic, emphasizing the tension when characters hesitate, either in speech or movement. Healy and sound designer Deanna H. Choi increase this intimacy with ASMR-esque amplification of the performers’ voices. Lav mics taped closely to their mouths catch whispers, breath, and even chewing. 

Herzog’s anachronistic dialogue is very funny in performance, but at times overly self-aware, echoed in the opening night audience’s frequent laughter. This self-awareness is likely unavoidable, as the play’s reputation will always precede it to some degree. Ibsen’s text was infamous in its time, dismantling the Victorian domestic ideal before the audience’s eyes. 

Nora’s physical exit from the house at the play’s end best evokes this dissolution, here unseen, but marked with a somewhat muddily amplified sound of a door closing. A Doll’s House was a lightning rod for controversy; audiences and critics viewed its refusal to punish Nora for abandoning her family as an attack on the untouchable sanctity of marriage. Over time, it came to symbolize the struggle for a woman’s agency under patriarchal control (although Ibsen himself saw it in more broadly humanist terms).

Now, a mother’s descent into something near sanity is less shocking than it would’ve been in Ibsen’s era (a full-page ad for Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love faces the cast list in the play’s programme). Instead, Healy’s interest seems to move more toward the way roles shape, even disfigure reality. This comes across sharply in the play’s final third, in which Nora and Torvald sit in two of those frequently rearranged chairs, their long shadows thrown onto the surrounding curtains: Plato’s allegory of the cave on velvet.

Gillis’ interpretation of Herzog’s text particularly highlights the conditional behaviours that humans build up and strip away. Her Nora is not so much a doll as she is a gifted actor, reeling through daffy comedy, seductive calculation, and suicidal ideation with ease. It’s a relevant companion performance to the one she gave in Healy’s 2025 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on the same stage, where Gillis featured as a childlike, giggling Honey whose affect belied something more feral, too. 

I never tire of art that remarks on how we internalize and act out inherited roles, upon ourselves and others. The moments when Gillis’ Nora seems to step out of the production are physically poignant, like when she watches her family gather at the table from the other side of the proscenium, taking on the audience’s point-of-view. 

We can’t all walk out of our lives as Nora does, but the enduring thrill of this 146-year-old play is that she does, allowing us the relief of seeing her choose the unknown over what’s expected of her and all that she — without even meaning to — expects of herself.

A Doll’s House runs at the Bluma Appel Theatre until February 1. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Naomi Skwarna

Naomi Skwarna is a National Magazine Award-winning writer with bylines in the New York Times, Vulture, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Hazlitt, the British Journal of Photography, and others. She has written previously about theatre for NOW Magazine and the Toronto Standard, and sometimes still does via her very intermittent newsletter, Seeing is Forgetting.

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