A door slam still echoes nearly 150 years later, and in Canadian Stage’s A Doll’s House, it lands with the force of something that is at once long overdue and urgently of the moment.
Under Brendon Healey’s taut direction, Henrik Ibsen’s famously disruptive drama – presented here in Amy Herzog’s lean, lucid adaptation – is not a museum piece but a psychological thriller unfolding in real time. The show’s two intermission-less hours pass in a tight, breath-held blur.
The plot unfolds with deceptive simplicity. Nora seems happily married to Torvald, a respectable banker, but she exists inside what she comes to recognize as a gilded cage. Years earlier, she secretly forged her father’s signature in order to secure a loan to save her husband’s life. As this crime now threatens to surface, Nora discovers the limits of Torvald’s love and the full consequences of her choices. The stakes of Nora’s forgery resonated sharply given the play’s roots in real events, where a woman’s attempt to save her husband’s life led not to his gratitude but to divorce and her institutionalization. In the play, this crisis forces Nora to confront the hollowness of her marriage and to make the decision to escape it – which shocked audiences in 1879, and still manages to unsettle in 2026.
Herzog’s adaptation is the key to the production’s immediacy. First staged in 2023 in a Tony-nominated Broadway production that reignited debate around the play, Herzog pares the language down to its essentials without flattening Ibsen’s ideas. The resulting text sharpens the play’s focus on marriage as less a romantic bond than a legal, social, and moral engine of female subservience. What is distilled is a searingly personal meditation on the roles of wife and mother – and the cost of subsuming one’s identity to those roles. Nora’s awakening is thus not framed as a rejection of love, but as a reckoning with the impossibility of self inside a structure designed to deny it.
Hailey Gillis is the beating heart of this production, delivering a Nora Helmer for the ages. When the play opens, her red-garbed Nora is all ebullient sparkle and nervous energy, flitting through the space like a decorative songbird who has mastered charm as a survival technique. Her physical specificity is striking: the way she perches, pivots, and circles the room suggests a woman always adjusting herself to be pleasing. As the evening progresses, Gillis allows that brightness to calcify into resolve, her body settling into sharper lines, and her voice into lower, more dangerous clarity. By the final moments, the black-clad Nora’s quiet revelation that she has never been happy in her marriage, “just cheerful,” feels painfully inevitable.
Her counterpart Gray Powell is equally impressive as Torvald Helmer. Powell resists caricature, offering instead a breezily confident man so convinced of his own moral centrality that he cannot see the damage he causes. His Torvald is by turns affectionate, patronizing, caring, panicked and cruel – all without ever tipping into reductive villainy. Powell captures something unsettlingly familiar: a man for whom every perceived crisis is proof that he must maintain – or tighten – his control.
The supporting cast is equally strong. David Collins’ ailing Dr Rank brings a quietly disturbing intimacy, while Jamie Robinson gives the loan-holding Krogstad an edge of desperation without menace or melodrama. Meanwhile, Laura Condlin’s Kristine offers a pragmatic, non-nonsense counterpoint to Nora’s illusions; while Elizabeth Saunders lends Anne-Marie a grounded authority shaped by survival.
The intensity of the production owes a great debt to Gillian Gallow’s ingenious set and costume design. The action unfolds in the Hellner family drawing room, which is framed at back by high double doors and a window that looks out onto falling snow – visible reminders of a world beyond the house that, for Nora, remains unreachable. Movement within the space is deliberately restricted: furniture shifts are limited almost entirely to the arranging and rearranging of dining chairs, a subtle choreography that echoes the repetition and sameness of Nora’s domestic life. Maroon velvet drapery, hung bunting style, encases the room, creating a sense of closeness and display, as though the action were unfolding inside a jewel box — or even a puppet theatre — carefully preserving and presenting its baubles or toys.
Significantly, the askew perspective of the room emphasizes not the back wall, but the corner with the double doors. Healey uses the confinement with precision, blocking scenes so that characters, particularly Nora, are boxed in, cornered, overheard or dwarfed by their surroundings. Altogether, this lovely yet sinister set is a major contributor to the unrelenting pressure of the experience: the sustained tension with lack of respite, and the sense we have of watching the same domestic patterns repeat inside this confined frame … with others coming into and out of those double doors, but not Nora.
When the play premiered in Copenhagen in 1879, Nora’s decision to leave her husband and children was so incendiary that alternate endings were staged in some countries. I would argue that this production goes a long way towards restoring this unease. In a moment when conversations about marriage, motherhood, and autonomy are painfully alive and important, Canadian Stage offers us a production that is bracing, nuanced, and clear-eyed: classic theatre that still knows exactly how to slam the door.
A Doll’s House runs at the Bluma Appel Theatre until February 1, 2026. Tickets are available at canadianstage.com.
Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
