The Girl from the Sea evaluation – Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander make waves in magnificent rewrite | Theatre

Writer-director Simon Stone is understood for his rock’n’roll takes on the classics. It is a characteristically high-octane model of Ibsen’s play: loud, fashionable and led by display screen stars Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. But his script, once more created within the rehearsal course of, retains all of Ibsen’s layers and provides a few of its personal within the updating.

All mystical discuss of the ocean and mermaids is excised. The manufacturing brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged but complicated household at its coronary heart that appears to be slowly drowning: Ellida (Vikander), because the younger, second spouse of neurologist Edward (Lincoln), is caught between life along with her husband and a protracted misplaced, formative ex-lover, Finn (Brendan Cowell), who makes a reappearance. Ellida’s stepdaughters, Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James), are attempting to remain afloat amid grief for his or her organic mom, who killed herself.

Stone blends psychological depth with overblown angst and amped-up humour. The place that blend of the comedian, home and tragic grated in his current Phaedra, right here the ridiculously OTT household rows offset the razor-sharp stress of Vikander and Lincoln’s deeply felt performances. Vikander doesn’t pull again from her character’s publicity whereas Lincoln is a pained alpha male pressured to cede management and made susceptible.

The query of feminine free will, pivotal to so lots of Ibsen’s performs, is essential within the unique: Ellida is “granted” her freedom by Edward. However in Stone’s model, she is just not a passive or mentally fragile lady and it’s clear she has free will, although Edward remains to be medicating her. Right here, she isn’t just caught between the safety of middle-class existence with Edward versus freedom and keenness with Finn – a charismatic local weather activist – but in addition between ideology, accountability in love and questions of consent.

The play deftly unpicks the 2 male figures in addition to her personal psychology. Initially, they appear to signify Ibsen’s binary forces – Finn akin to elemental ardour, Edward signifying conference. However there’s extra to it than that and Ellida wakes as much as the imbalance of energy and coercive parts in each relationships. Her previous love for Finn is fleshed out and made extra difficult by an age distinction: she was 15 when she met him, he in his 30s. The parable of Leda, echoed in Ellida’s title, takes on eerie resonances. So does a storyline round local weather protest and the criminalising of activism.

Lizzie Clachan’s set wavers between realism and symbolism, altering from brilliant summer season white to black within the second act, which turns into sodden with rainwater because the play’s darkish passions are unleashed.

The comedian anger and rows stay, changing into shrill: distant cousin Lyle (John Macmillan) is amusingly wry however younger sculptor Heath (Joe Alwyn), who has a terminal analysis (not the TB-like sickness of the unique), too inconceivably jokes about his imminent dying. Hilda, whose mom was Black, speaks of being mixed-race in an overwhelmingly white city in shouty ways in which appear latched on.

None of this takes away from the full-bodied depth of the manufacturing, which is fantastically unique, gripping and luxurious to the tip.