Newsnight Review discussed Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea at the Almeida theatre.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
Vanessa Redgrave played this on Broadway and at the Roundhouse. You saw that. Did that colour your viewing of watching her daughter play that?

BONNIE GREER:
Nope. Natasha Richardson has the timbre of her mother. That's there. They're two totally different approaches. Vanessa Redgrave just creates this world, and you push through it. Natasha Richardson is always pulling back, trying to ground herself in the reality of her home, her family and at the same time being tugged out to this dream state, this other reality that she has. I was sitting there looking at it, and I thought to myself, there's only a handful of directors who know how to make the stage work, and Trevor Nunn is one of them. He always delivers whether you like what he's doing or not, it's beautiful. You can feel the heat on the stage. You feel the poetic dimension. He does something actually. He allows the poetry of the play to come through, and so does she.

KIRSTY WARK:
Unlike Shakespeare, this couldn't become a contemporary play. It's so much set in its time, its period.

TIM LOTT:
It feels creaky in that respect. I don't feel it translates very well to now. It feels very stagey. I quite enjoyed it, but I felt Natasha Richardson, although I think she's a fine actress, got a bit carried away with the mad acting here and tried to ring too much out of it. It was hysterical and over the top and I found it unconvincing.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
There are problems, but they're not down to her. The play is in two halves, the ensemble bits and the heightened one, which I agree don't work so well. I thought it was like Checkov. It was like Doll's House with a happy ending. It was stuff with a leader. But the stuff of mutual disappointments and the counterpoints of failures were much, much like Checkov. That was funny as it got sadder. The scene with the botched proposal was one of the most devastating themes I've seen. They're there in the expressionist bits, but they worked so much better there. How devastating it was for her to realise what her choices were. As she begins to explore them, the man shrinks.

BONNIE GREER:
We can't talk about Ibsen, in this way. This is a great play. I think what we've lost in our age is a kind of poetic dimension. I think we're losing how to go to the theatre and see a poetic piece of work. We're very television, journalistic oriented. Trevor Nunn takes a big chance. He goes with the feeling of the play. He has music in it, the lighting.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
I felt the music was a mistake.

BONNIE GREER:
It was absolutely right because that is the essence of the play.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
The music called attention to the inconsistency of the play.

KIRSTY WARK:
You say it's a bit creaky, but what about the evocation of the sea itself and the set? I thought what did work was the angled disc on which the set was set. It left a lot more to the soundscape, but I thought it worked much better.

TIM LOTT:
I thought it worked profoundly well. I thought there was a fantastic sense of atmosphere and you were right inside it. I didn't feel that the sound worked either. I thought the music was very distracting from the play as a whole.

BONNIE GREER:
Beautiful play, go see it.