A Doll's House This is London

Playwright Zinnie Harris is either remarkably prescient or has been updating her new version of Ibsen’s classic feminist drama as the current scandal of MPs’ expenses unfolds. She’s moved events from Norway in 1879 to London thirty years later where, on Christmas Eve, Nora is decorating the festive tree in the house her family has occupied since her husband Thomas’s recent promotion to an important government post. His first increased paycheque hasn’t yet arrived, though, and both her dress and her behaviour speak of a worryingly extravagant attitude to money.

But there’s more to Nora than even her husband realises and her apparent spendthrift nature belies a ‘save and mend’ frugality which she’s kept hidden from all. He sees his ‘Nora Mouse’ as a trophy wife, eager to please in the bedroom but not to be troubled with serious affairs, whereas in reality her efforts (including a forged signature) have created the façade which has safeguarded his political success but now threaten to undo it.

It’s an evening of well-acted contrasts with Tara Fitzgerald’s widowed Christine an austere counterpoint to Gillian Anderson’s troubled, doll-like Nora, andToby Stephens’ patronising Thomas (Torvald, a bank clerk, in the original) bursting with a puffed-up vitality long drained from Anton Lesser’s tubercular Dr. Rank and Christopher Eccleston’s embittered Kelman (the disgraced previous holder of Thomas’s cabinet post).

Anthony Ward’s lofty design of unfilled floor to ceiling bookshelves hints ominously that the transformation to family home is destined never to happen, and director Kfir Yefet’s production leaves no doubt that morals can be very flexible - especially when there’s no possibility of discovery.

Donmar until 18 July.