The Lady from the Sea reviews – Starring Alicia Vikander & Andrew Lincoln

"Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander make waves in magnificent rewrite"

"Ibsen’s mysticism and mermaids are thrown out as director Simon Stone amps up the 1888 play’s psychological intensity with his eco-focused update"

"Writer-director Simon Stone is known for his rock’n’roll takes on the classics. This is a characteristically high-octane version of Ibsen’s play: loud, modern and led by screen stars Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln. Yet his script, again created in the rehearsal process, retains all of Ibsen’s layers and adds some of its own in the updating."

"The production brings a sharply lit realism to the privileged yet complex family at its heart that seems to be slowly drowning"

"Stone blends psychological intensity with overblown angst and amped-up humour... here the ridiculously OTT family rows offset the razor-sharp tension of Vikander and Lincoln’s deeply felt performances."

"Lizzie Clachan’s set wavers between realism and symbolism"

"... fantastically original, gripping and magnificent to the end."

"Some plays are perfectly formed but perhaps a little dull. Some meander but are utterly compelling. Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea probably falls into the second category. Simon Stone’s adaptation “after Ibsen” certainly does."

"The naturalistic dialogue of these early exchanges fizzes with excitement and humour. This feels like a real home, with family tensions bubbling just below the surface. The script is demotic, flowing, beautifully written, and the entire cast inhabit it with ease, drawing the lines of character with power and subtlety."

"The production, however, is clumsier than the script. I took against Lizzie Clachan’s staging"

"As the second part unfolds, the stage fills with water – raining from above and filling a deep pool below. It is undoubtedly dramatic, adding to the sense of a stable life being engulfed by forces beyond anyone’s control, but it is so overwhelming that it’s easy to get lost in the mechanics of the drainage system rather than the human drama unfolding within it."

"Such distractions only matter because so much of The Lady from the Sea is utterly superb. Lincoln is completely convincing... Vikander is fascinating"

"Alicia Vikander is drowned out"

"Andrew Lincoln is tremendous in the lead role, but his Hollywood co-star is frequently inaudible — and Simon Stone’s Ibsen update is relentlessly self-aware"

"There are plenty of sharply observed modern-day moments in Simon Stone’s Ibsen rejig, not to mention a tremendous star turn from Andrew Lincoln and a valiant stage debut from an often only-just-audible Alicia Vikander."

"But as hard a time as Ibsen-cum-Stone’s characters are having... you still need to enjoy being in their company. I found that a challenge."

"Stone’s idea is to take the core of a classic text and make it come alive for now. Here, at an overlong two hours and 40 minutes, he’s rather swamped Ibsen’s mystical original with all the byplay. It’s Succession-level skilful moment by moment, but alienatingly relentless en masse."

"Grace Oddie-James and Isobel Akuwudike are excellent as the daughters, but have to wear their sass like a suit of armour they can’t get out of."

"Lincoln is the big draw. Sometimes convivial, sometimes overbearing, sometimes an angry mess, he holds everything together even when Edward can no longer hold anything together."

"Would you dump a husband as sexy as Andrew Lincoln?"

"The Walking Dead star makes it difficult to empathise with Ibsen’s straying heroine in The Lady from the Sea"

"The snag is that the staging, by Australian hotshot Simon Stone (with semi-abstract design by Lizzie Clachan), leaves his cast first high and dry on an exposing platform, then drowning in directorial overkill, as a deluge turns the set into a raised pool."

"More of a problem is that Lincoln’s physician resembles a fairly ideal husband whose sex appeal makes it hard for us to grasp the tug of cravings in our irresolute heroine."

"The leads compel, even so. Vikander grows in power throughout the evening, as her character attempts to reconcile past with future. And both she and Lincoln excel at capturing concerted composure crumpling into mid-life anguish."

"But, in the end, the night is more memorable for incidental pleasures. I was hooked by the eloquent despair of Joe Alwyn’s Heath"

"Alicia Vikander makes a luminous stage debut in a waterlogged Lady from the Sea"

"Despite a fine cast including Andrew Lincoln and Joe Alwynm the Bridge Theatre production loses subtext in favour of scale"

"His Lady from the Sea is fresh, often funny, making more potent the dizzying shock when characters suddenly find themselves knocked off track. And yet the overall results this time feel more mixed."

"Stone’s dialogue crackles with wit"

"It’s also superbly acted. Lincoln excels in the difficult role of Edward, a man struggling to swim in alien new waters, and Vikander is magnetic as Ellida"

"Amazing as this looks, it begins to feel top-heavy, as do the flashes of strobe lighting. We understand the overwhelming scale of the characters’ feelings more than their nuanced complexity, and we lose subtext."

"There are rich truths in here about human nature and contemporary life, but it feels like a piece that may yet come into its own a little further downstream."

"The stars play a troubled married couple in auteur director Simon Stone’s radical Ibsen rewrite"

"... The Lady from the Sea proceeds exactly as you’d expect a Simon Stone play to proceed. There is a lot of very posh banter, that’s very entertaining in a Made in Chelsea sort of way."

"This is all preposterous of course, the oil rig story making it sillier than the original play by some distance. And yet godammit, Stone is so good at the serious stuff."

"... the scenes between Vikander and Cowell are electric. Vikander offers a magnificently complex study in ambivalence"

"Big name Lincoln does a solid job as an overly controlling but fundamentally decent posh boy"

"Stone is a real throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks guy. He excavates some interesting, complex stuff on consent, memory and the controlling nature of men."

"Stone’s Lady from the Sea is a tonally uneven play with a weird relationship with the source material and plenty of moments of pure indulgence. But here’s the thing: when it’s serious, it’s very good. And when it’s silly it remains maddeningly entertaining."

"Alicia Vikander is mesmerising in The Lady from the Sea"

"This modern adaptation of Ibsen’s more difficult, less performed dramas has great momentum - it tries to cram too much in, though"

"The great news is that Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead, Love Actually) and Oscar winner Alicia Vikander – in her London stage debut – make for a phenomenal central pairing as a distinguished older man on his second marriage and an attractive younger woman on her first."

"The trouble with Stone’s updating of this story – of past loves returning to haunt current lives – is that he attempts to afford too many characters too great a slice of the dramatic action. The narrative becomes increasingly centrifugal"

"This is an immense pity, as Vikander gives a mesmerisingly twitchy performance as a woman living on her nerves, whose sinuous and twisting physicality expresses deep emotional unrest."

"... Stone never allows the momentum to slacken. He tries to cram too much in, though"

"Alicia Vikander left adrift in directionless Ibsen adaptation"

"Although playwright Simon Stone’s dialogue is almost aggressively 21st century, he doesn’t seem especially interested in the contemporary themes the production gestures to"

"When hyped directors put their stamp on a classic, they usually pare it back, making heightened emotions surge through a shortened runtime. But not Simon Stone... He’s taken Henrik Ibsen’s tragic fable and extended it into something both lengthy and oddly mundane"

"It’s an unlikely showcase for the talents of a confident Andrew Lincoln(The Walking Dead) and Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, who seems understandably adrift making her stage debut in this directionless play."

"Vikander feels marginal as Edward’s second wife Ellida, as if she’s a bystander in her own plighted love story."

"... although Stone’s dialogue here is almost aggressively 21st century, he doesn’t seem especially interested in the contemporary themes he gestures to.... More damningly, it feels that in laboriously engineering a plausible 21st-century setting for Ibsen’s story to unfold in, Stone has lost sight of what this play’s actually about."

"Andrew Lincoln and Alicia Vikander sink in soggy melodrama"

"Big stars from Alicia Vikander to Andrew Lincoln and Joe Alwyn can't save this ludicrously overwrought adaptation of Ibsen's The Lady from The Sea, at The Bridge."

"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."

"This time, his modern reworking of the Ibsen drama is overwritten, overacted, overblown and overlong."

"Joe Alwyn is wonderfully odd but actually rather affecting as the lonely loner plunged into all the mayhem, and rather enjoying it"

"The whole production screams of a grating hyper-realism, where it tries so hard to feel raw and real that almost nothing rings true."

"A waste of a powerful story, great cast and my time."