Rain is sleeting down on stage, a genuine Hollywood star is writhing in the pool with a rough Aussie, three awkward posh chaps bromantically but increasingly tediously trade literary quotes or navel gaze, while a gobby Gen Z lesbian and her stroppy younger sister (in buttock-baring denim shorts and cowboy boots) find the rest as insufferable as we do them.
And everyone, but everyone, is relentlessly intense, dialled to eleven and fully committed to the single defining character trope they each possess. It’s exhausting.
Simon Stone previously adapted and directed Phaedra with Janet McTeer at the National Theatre which was equally OTT and divisive, but I actually loved the melodrama. This time, his modern reworking of the Ibsen drama is overwritten, overacted, overblown and overlong.
Shame, when the cast is potentially so exciting. Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander is the titular lost soul, Ellida, superficially happily married to suave older doctor Edward (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) but harbouring dark secrets. He’s genuinely a good guy, but so focussed on doing and appearing to do the right thing, perhaps wilfully blind to all the cracks in his life.
His mixed-race daughters Asa (Gracie Odie-James) and Hilda (Isabel Akuwudike) struggle under his suffocating love and the trauma of losing their mother to suicide. Both nail the obnoxious, self-righteous selfishness of their age, but both actresses commendably bring some humanity to their roles.
Joe Alwyn is wonderfully odd but actually rather affecting as the lonely loner plunged into all the mayhem, and rather enjoying it, even as he faces devastating news. He was possibly the only character I remotely cared about on the undeniably impressive (and it knew it) stage.
We sit wrapped around the raised stage in a U-shape. The first half, everything from furniture to floor is white. Act Two, it’s all black. Kinda cool but also so self-aware. Rather like every beat of dialogue, every choreographed gesture, it all feels so considered, so, frankly, attention-seeking.
Stone famously reworks classics in a collaborative process with his cast, where he writes scenes as they go along, often without a complete ending until late in the day. This should chime in with the wild storm of Ibsen’s story, instead it all gets so bogged down, so frustratingly talky and artificially over-articulate that it ceases to convince.
The whole production screams of a grating hyper-realism, where it tries so hard to feel raw and real that almost nothing rings true.
Brendan Cowell brings some welcome muscularity as Ellida’s dreaded blast from the past, who nicely subverts our expectations. There’s a chance for some interesting reevaluations of all we have seen, but instead it all descends into a ludicrous, never-ending finale.
A waste of a powerful story, great cast and my time.
THE LADY FROM THE SEA AT THE BRIDGE THEATRE TO NOVEMBER 9