MosesWrites
The Lady from The Sea
Written and directed by Simon Stone
After Henrik Ibsen
Bridge Theater, London
Matinee performance Thursday 6 November 2025, seat D1
Why do people have children?
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, regardless of love or affection, for most people an essential clarity could endure: for labor, to perpetuate a titular lineage, to go off to war and die, to sustain a basic functioning community across generations despite the tremendous risk of death in childbirth and extreme infant mortality.
Yet since the population explosion of the early modern era, we’ve had more people than we know what to do with, not least most recently in terms of accelerating climate devastation. In 2025, honestly, I struggle to know why most people anywhere have children, beyond social custom and egotism.
Simon Stone has given us a brilliant meditation on this question in his production of The Lady from The Sea currently wrapping up at Bridge Theater in London.
All of Ibsen’s characters have a haunting loss, an inability to understand why their parents birthed them, or why they’ve birthed or might birth children. Edward, Hilda, Asa, and Ellida have the impossible grief of parental suicide, whether of a father, mother, or wife. Finn fucked a 15-year-old and pretends he didn’t know, and he may well have caused the death of Edward and Ellida’s unborn child. Lyle cycles through women briskly enough to never confront the question of fatherhood while trying to father Hilda and Asa. Heath might have felt better off had his parents killed themselves, rather than enduring the sustained expression of their emotionally stunted disdain. Will they even notice after he dies? Likely they’ll feel relief.
Stone recreates the edge of modernity for a planet on the brink of collapse. Ecoterrorism (as The Corporate Man would have it) or noble resistance (for Finn and young Ellida) set the immediate action in play, if immediately twenty years removed and thrust into a miscarried present.
By and large the actors perform well Stone’s vision.
For her stage debut, Vikander shows promise. She’s limited in vocal range and struggled in some moments to match the emotional tenor of the script. She does anger quite well, though, and I believed her anger and sadness in those moments Ellida revealed to Edward her past with Finn, and when she recounted the death of her father. But the awkwardness as a stepmother became too under- or over-performed at various points.
Lincoln did excellently. I had some doubts about anything magnificent until the end, when I could feel a true transformation and relief after Edward’s time alone with Heath. Maybe the intimacy with a man let him realize he didn’t need to get everything from women, whether first or second or future wife, or his daughters. Alwyn-as-Heath does have nice abs, and a good sense of humor, so I’m sure they could have future fun even in the face of terminal illness. Or could he live on with and through Manchester-bound Asa (with props to Oddie-James)?
Akuwudike as Hilda stole the show. She balanced between generations and races and genders with a brilliant, active, poise. I felt like the play had been written for her. I’m excited to see what she’ll do at Yale, her balance between New Haven and New York in the New World, her expanded sense of the Anglo-European imperial past and present, her enigmas of arrival and return to the UK.
I loved the staging: the mystery of the pool, the descent and ascent, the connection to fresh and salty waters: technical bravo and yet subtle and soundless except for the falling rain.
Will Ellida return to her teenage years and discover the freedom she needs to explore and love absent a father and mother and absent too an older male replacement for her father? Can she mother those who haven’t one, or one that loves them, or one who hasn’t abandoned them?
If she can again, without Finn, find that profound passion to protect the earth, she’ll be the mother we all so desperately need, restorative rather than destructively reproductive.