The Lady From the Sea Review

Posted on Sep 19, 2025 | By Hay Brunsdon

Simon Stone’s radical reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea brings a storm surge of modern anxieties onto the stage. The original play, with its mystical undertow of freedom and fate, has always given Ellida (Alicia Vikander) a siren-like quality — a woman half-bound to the sea, torn between the safety of marriage with a well-to-do Doctor, played by Andrew Lincoln and the dangerous allure of the her past. In this version, that siren imagery thrums through the text, but it’s filtered through an age of Instagram poetry, OnlyFans accounts and in true, politically-charged Simon Stone style, climate protests.

While the original was set in Norway, Stone transports his version to the placidity of the Lake District. Ellida’s inland life has left her restless and estranged. Her connection to The Stranger (Brendan Cowell), a man from her past who resurfaces after 20 years in prison to reclaim her, is deeply troubling. This is not the romantic “young sailor” figure some might expect. Instead, he is more than fifteen years older, a man who first bound her to him when she was just fifteen. He’s basically her now-husband Edward’s age and this eerie doubling sharpens the unease: two men, both from the same generation, one framed as stability and the other as threat. Ellida is left circling between them, caught between compulsion, fear and a trauma bond she cannot shake. Stone does not shy away from this discomfort — he places it centre stage, asking what happens when youthful infatuation, vulnerability and inexperience collide with adult reality.

What could become suffocatingly tense is softened by the presence of the Edward’s two teenage daughters Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike) and Asa (Gracie Oddie-James). Their comic relief punctuates the darker undercurrents of the play, giving the audience space to breathe. Their storylines — dabbling with older suitors, experimenting with desire, yearning for escape — echo Ellida’s dilemma in miniature. The fractal effect is powerful: everyone is wrestling with what it means to choose, and whether those choices are really free.

Lizzie Clachan’s staging itself is extraordinary. At one point, rain pours for several minutes, filling a pool that becomes the setting for Ellida’s fraught reunion with The Stranger, Finn. What begins as a surreal, dreamlike image transforms into something startlingly real, a physical manifestation of her restlessness and desire. It’s a breathtaking theatrical coup that captures the whole production: the mythic colliding with the everyday, danger bleeding into domesticity.

Stone’s version delves deeper into Ellida’s past, making her far more fully realised. We learn that her father died when she was twelve — a wound that shaped her sense of self long before she met either man. Yet the play resists easy shorthand, showing not just “daddy issues” but a woman grappling with her own trauma, striving to go away and find herself, and to define what freedom truly means. It’s a genuinely complex role: Alicia Vikander inhabits Ellida with striking emotional precision, while Andrew Lincoln shines as the first-patient-then-utterly-baffled cuckold, ricocheting between delicate support and blistering rage — “I’m a Pseudo Alpha C*nt because I don’t want my wife to f*ck another man” is now possibly my favourite line in any play.

Stone’s play asks what it means to be free — whether the sea is an escape, a trap, or a mirror of our own desires. Like Ellida herself, the piece drifts and surges, and its refusal to settle is what makes it so gripping.

The Lady From the Sea is playing at the Bridge Theatre until Sat 8 Nov 2025. Book your tickets today.