The Lady from the Sea: a ‘thrillingly contemporary’ Ibsen adaptation

“Some plays are perfectly formed but perhaps a little dull,” said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. “Some meander but are utterly compelling.”

Ibsen’s “The Lady from the Sea” (1888) – about a young wife caught between safe domesticity and an old lover, a sailor who returns to her port town – probably fits in that latter category; and Simon Stone’s “after Ibsen” adaptation certainly does.

Stone has a reputation for “visceral and gripping” updates of classic dramas (“Yerma”, “Phaedra”). For this “thrillingly contemporary shake-up”, he has swapped 19th-century Norway for a modern home by Lake Windermere, and gathered a “luminous” cast, led by Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. The result is “hugely enjoyable”; and if it “isn’t quite as revealing as the best of Stone’s work, it’s only because he has set himself a very high bar”.

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Lincoln is terrific as the husband, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times – and Vikander is “magnetic as Ellida, combining a lithe, bright physical presence with a quiet sense of deeply buried torment. Their climactic showdown is gripping.”

The staging is good too, “full of skill and ingenuity”, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. But the adaptation “drowns out Ibsen’s alluring strangeness as much as it makes it resonate”. And while the rain that pours onto the long, traverse set adds intensity in the second half, a brooding love scene between Vikander and Brendan Cowell, as her returned eco-warrior lover, is “slow, soggy and silly”.

I found the whole thing a bit of a damp squib, said Alice Saville in The Independent. In “laboriously engineering” a plausible modern setting for Ibsen’s story, Stone has lost sight of what the play is actually about. Ellida’s “pivotal” choice between “bourgeois comfort and the elemental, sexual lure of the sea” could feel current, but somehow ends up as an afterthought – which is doubly odd, given the “vast amounts of water” that drenches the cast.

Once the “ridiculous symbolic weather front” swamps the stage, it’s hard to really focus on the drama, said Robert Gore-Langton in The Mail on Sunday. It’s a “classic case of rain stops play”.

Bridge Theatre, London SE1. Until 8 November