A Doll's House

Synopsis

First performed in Copenhagen in 1879. Christmas Eve. Excitement and love filled the Helmer's apartment. Nora is her husband's cherished 'songbird' and the romance of their marriage has been played out over the years. But beneath the carefree surface of their lives, the secret of how Nora saved her husband's life begins to emerge. Tension increases as the characters react against one another and this taut and gripping drama ends as Nora demands her right to individual freedom. One of the great landmark plays of the nineteenth century.

Our Review:

24 July 2008

If you’re going to have a season exploring women’s place in society, as Peter Hall outlines in the programme to his 2008 Bath season, then you certainly can’t do it without Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The iconic work in modern drama, a few of us have seen one or two by now. One thinks of Janet McTeer and Cheryl Campbell, definitive Noras breaking loose from marital fetters, child-women emerging into a harsher self-realisation. Last year, veteran American avant-gardist Lee Breuer also shocked a few in Edinburgh with his radical reworking, Dollhouse, a version in which Nora’s journey became a visual metaphor for sexual politics played out visually within a doll’s house of tiny doors and looming giant puppets – a veritable Grimm’s tale.

No such iconoclastic license has been taken by Hall in his new production (translation by Stephen Mulrine) although Simon Higlett’s opening façade – a handsome townhouse frontage which quickly becomes transparent – does suggest an o...

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