A Doll’s House takes over stage at Theatre Calgary with domestic drama loaded with emotional explosions

Carmela Sison (Kristine), Daniel Briere (Torvald) and Alexandra Lainfiesta (Nora) in Theatre Calgary's A Doll's House. (

The first thing you notice about Nora (Alexandra Lainfiesta) at the start of Theatre Calgary’s co-production (with the Vancouver Arts Club) of A Doll’s House, which opened Friday at the Max Bell Theatre, is how she talks about money.

It’s Christmas Eve in a Norwegian town in the late 19th century and happily-married, apparently upper-middle-class Nora has been out Christmas shopping and now she’s back in her townhome showing the presents to soon-to-be prosperous husband Torvald (Daniel Briere).

Torvald, a middle-aged, middle-class lawyer who has secured a lucrative new job managing the bank in town, assesses the presents she bought their two children, himself and their friends and then asks what she bought herself.

Nothing, she says.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Cash,” Nora says, in a slightly whimsical way, as if the playwright had stripped away all the paint on the wall -- the Christmas feels -- and just given us the bare wood.

“Give me money.”

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, is a theatrical classic, one of the breakthrough dramas that explored a marriage through the eyes of a wife at a time when stage stories were filtered through the male gaze.

Theatre Calgary’s production is an updated adaptation, by playwright Amy Herzog, that was presented on Broadway in 2023 starring Jessica Chastain in her Broadway debut.

It all unfolds in an oversized, somewhat diagonal-looking living room dominated by institutional blue walls and a massive red couch that spans most of the Max Bell Theatre stage.

The unsettling set design (by Amir Ofek) all feels like a little bit of a cross between Pee Wee’s Playhouse, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

It’s posh -- there’s Anne-Marie, the nanny (Elinor Holt) -- who looks after Nora’s two adorable young chlidren, Ivar (Dominc King) and Emmy (Daivah Rose Blankert) -- but it’s all embedded into a kind of stage hallucination that softly suggests a crazy lady walking and talking.

On the other hand, Nora looks marvelous. She’s pretty and witty -- which Torvald, who has been married to her for eight years, constantly remarks upon, mentioning how beautiful she is and how crazy he still is about her and how good they’ve got it now that the money will be rolling in from the new bank gig.

Lainfiesta’s Nora is not quite a reliable narrator but she’s a compelling, quirky one nevertheless -- and as the story unfolds, there turns out to be a twist in her apparently charmed bourgeois life that complicates everything.

Without spoiling it, it’s about money.

There’s an old friend Kristine Lind (Carmela Sison), a bank colleague with secrets named Nils Krogstad (Ron Pederson) and a dear old friend of Torvald, Doctor Rank (Marcus Youssef) who’s charming and sympathetic to Nora’s needs.

In the second act, Nora’s secret brings things to a boil between herself and Norvald, setting in motion plenty of emotional fireworks about female emancipation that feel a little bit Feminism 1.0 -- but hey, A Doll’s House premiered (in Denmark) in 1879, so cut it some slack.

There’s also plenty of pertinent commentary about the way we stay married now in A Doll’s House, proving that people might change, but marriages still have the same issues they always have had -- and it never hurts to listen to your elders.

I’ve never seen the Ibsen original, but apparently it was three acts, and Herzog’s adaptation condenses Nora’s journey so that in the second act, the emotional epiphanies come fast and furious -- almost too fast and furious, truth be told.

A lot of is triggered by a letter in the mailbox that’s the money bomb and when push comes to shove -- as Torvald is about to discover the explosive secret -- Nora suddenly becomes oddly passive and fatalistic, as if her life has lost its agency.

It doesn’t help the dramatic reveal that Torvald discovers her secret offstage, which is never where someone should discover an explosive secret in a play about the explosive secrets of women on the verge of a nervous breakdown!

There does seem to be a point, in this bullet-pointed contemporized presentation of A Doll’s House, where the emotional attachments to Nora and Torvald begin to fray for the audience, even as you can’t help but enjoy the way Lainfiesta brings her to vivid life onstage.

Lainfiesta is small and powerful and forceful onstage and if her Nora starts to make bad choices in the name of personal freedom, Lainfiesta manages to make us root for her nonetheless.

If only Nora had only learned the lesson every New Yorker is taught and has hard-wired into their brains, which is probably why they thought bringing A Doll’s House back to Broadway for a 21st century revival was a good idea: never let a bad relationship get in the way of a good apartment.

Director Anita Rochon brings style and an ability to create grounded characters to this Doll’s House.

Briere’s Torvald is a familiar sort of family patriarch, but Briere invests him with humanity and almost finds his warmth -- he finds his banker warmth.

Youssef’s Dr. Rank is nothing but humanity and warmth and secrets and sadness, and almost steals the whole show just by not getting anything he wants.

Sison is solid as BFF Kristine and Pederson is able to create a complex -- and even sympathetic -- portrayal of heel Nils Krogstad.

King and Blankert, as Nora’s beautiful children, are pitch perfect.

And Holt, as Anne-Marie the nanny, has the worried eyes of a woman who knows things that husbands are always the last to find out.

A Doll’s House at Theatre Calgary through May 3.