Word: torvald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...little squirrel" imagery of the play literally, she skitters about the stage like a sandpiper. This does not destroy Nora's coquettishness, but it certainly diminishes it. There seems to be an arbitrary rhetoric of motions with which Ullmann plays the role. When she fears that her husband Torvald (Sam Waterston) will discover her secret dealings with the malignant moneylender Krogstadt (Barton Heyman), she makes the panicky gestures of a heroine in a silent-movie melodrama. When she reads the riot act to Torvald prior to slamming the famous door, she sits as motionless as a pillar...
...supporting cast cannot save A Doll's House if the Nora buckles. Still, this cast might be sued for nonsupport. With no trace of a guiding hand from Norwegian Director Tormod Skagestad, the players appear to be introducing themselves to each other at first rehearsal. As Torvald, Waterston is a mildly ruffled porcupine who can be dequilled instantly by Ullmann. Petty or not, Torvald should be a visible tyrant. After all, Nora is not slamming the door at middle-level management, but at the historic tyranny of convention...
When I asked McCleery if the suspicious resemblance between the relationships in his play and in A Doll's House were merely coincidental, he acknowledged that Nora and Torvald Handover were pretty strong influences on him as he created the Hardesty pair. He drew a lot from Ibsen: marital strife stemming from an imbalanced relationship, the husband's view of the wife as a subservient partner, and the wife's surreptitious assistance to the husband and his career success. But Hardesty Park lacks the pessimistic and jaded timbre of Ibsen's drama...
...vigor and passion of commitment, however, and the cast is superb. Trevor Howard's Dr. Rank is gruffly tender; Delphine Seyrig's Kristine, a woman of tentative but dependable dignity; and Edward Fox's Krogstad, a figure of understandable desperation. David Warner makes Torvald into a complex, insidious but always human figure. It is a performance of the foremost skill and intelligence, and includes a quick moment-when, with meticulous condescension, he mimics Nora sewing-that is worth a gross of pamphlets and essays on sexism...
...than Claire Bloom's airy Nora, a stage performance recently translated to film (TIME, June 18). One thing Fonda manages well is the delicate transition behind the closed bedroom door. As in the play, we do not see Nora change, but when Fonda comes out again to confront Torvald and prepare to leave, the viewer feels he can calibrate the painful inches by which the decision has been reached. Her fire and intelligence cause all the melodrama in the moment to fall aside and reveal a hard truth...