Give the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen a domestic setting and it’s sure he would’ve returned with a drama that checked all the boxes of playmaking: marriage, desire, loss, rebirth and freedom.
More than a century after the publication of Ibsen’s “The Lady From the Sea,” the play is coming back to the stage once again, this time at London’s Bridge Theatre with Academy Award-winning actor Alicia Vikander taking the role of Ellida Wangel and Andrew Lincoln as her husband, Dr. Edvard Wangel.
The play, first published 136 years ago, is loosely based on the classic Scandinavian ballad of a woman leaving her life behind to live in the sea with a merman she’s fallen in love with. She returns to land one day and starts to contemplate if she’s made the right choice — in some versions she stays on land and in others, she returns to the sea.
In Ibsen’s version, Ellida is the second wife of the doctor and was previously engaged to a sailor who murdered his captain and ran away, but asks Ellida to wait for him. Years later, her past catches up with her future as she makes a choice between the two.
“The Lady From the Sea” has been adapted for the stage numerous times, from Vanessa Redgrave as Ellida in Michael Elliott’s 1979 production to an opera version by Craig Armstrong and Zoë Strachan that premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2012.
The play opens Sept. 10 and runs through Nov. 8.