Simon Stone’s 21st-century Ibsen

Stone takes classic texts and shakes them till audiences hear the rattle of new resonance. In Yerma, which encased the action in a glass box, the heroine became a blogger; in Phaedra, the central forbidden love was reconfigured and made plausible. Now he relocates Ibsen’s 1888 drama – originally set on the Norwegian coast – to 21st-century England. There are references to brain surgeons and Brooklyn Beckham (“not a pseudo chef”) and Dignitas and climate change activism. There is much splashing in a centre-stage swimming pool and not a button boot in sight.

This is not assault but rescue. Or partial rescue. Ibsen’s farsighted but lumpy play moves awkwardly between social realism and symbolism, with both aspects over-emphatically proclaimed. Never has the unconscious been so conscious of itself. A woman is torn between her life with her considerate husband (and his two stroppy daughters from a former marriage) and her past with a domineering sailor who returns, shaggily charismatic with a prison record, to claim her. She has a woo-woo affinity with water: her father was – hi, Freud – a lighthouse keeper. The crux of the drama is that she cannot make a real choice, or even know what she wants, until the men let her go. It is progressive, exciting but laboriously spelt out – as if DH Lawrence had lent Ibsen a pen.

In 28 years, I have reviewed four stagings of The Lady from the Sea: fewer than half the number I have seen of A Doll’s House. The play is more or less unstageable in its first English version by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (in which one of the stage directions involves “going thither”) and this is not the first time it has been strikingly updated. Eight years ago, a radiant version by the playwright Elinor Cook at the Donmar transported the action to the Caribbean of the 1950s.

Stone’s play – he is here credited as the author, with the script being described as “after Ibsen” – does not strip the drama of its hectic glaring: there is too much wallowing in that pool. Yet this is more than merely a riff on the original and it does some honour to Ibsen, lighting up the extent to which so many strands are entangled in the dilemma of entrapped women. The revelation of the evening is the remaking of the two daughters by Gracie Oddie-James and Isobel Akuwudike as a jangling twosome, sharp-edged with sadness and restless intellectual ambition – both outstanding young actresses. Oddie-James is costumed with special astuteness by Mel Page: in complicated layers of shorts and ungovernable slipping braces, she is both underclad and overdressed, out there but half in hiding.

As the pivot and supposed heroine, Alicia Vikander is poignant but muted, overshadowed for me by the memory of Vanessa Redgrave in the same part sweeping across the stage of the Roundhouse like a wave more than 40 years ago. Andrew Lincoln does a terrific job making the steady husband a humane force as well as a flawed male. Each character is given the extreme particularity more usually associated with Chekhov than with Ibsen: John Macmillan, multiply humorous as an ambiguous family friend, could be one of the Russian dramatist’s oddball onlookers.

In the end, Stone’s originality lies not in shock transformation but in tempo. His productions move to a different beat. This is an evening of dramatic contrasts. Lizzie Clachan’s design – Ikea-style garden furniture – begins all white and turns abruptly to a shade of black cinder. Thriller changes punctuate the action: the first half ends on a sudden appearance; the second on a surge through water like the reverse of a baptism. Lights quickly glow to indicate scene change: Stefan Gregory’s soundscape wails in the dark.

Crucially, the speed of delivery is rapid – hard to get the hang of at first – and completely distinctive: characters steam through dialogue often overlapping with each other, weaving gestures into speeches as if they were words. It is no surprise that Stone relies much on improvisation in rehearsals; this often sounds like high-pitched, overheard conversation: hugely amplified and yet oddly natural. As if Stone has altered the atmospheric pressure.

The Lady from the Sea is at Bridge theatre, London, until 8 November

Photographs by Johan Persson