Download A Doll`s House, Repertory Theatre Birmingham

A Doll's House
By Henrik Ibsen, in a new adaptation by Bryony Lavery
Birmingham Rep and Touring
Review by Steve Orme (2004)
Playwrights have turned to human conflict for their plots for hundreds of years. What
troubled people four centuries ago can cause a similar amount of angst today. That's
one of the reasons why Shakespeare can speak as loudly to modern as Elizabethan
audiences.
But Ibsen was different. He looked at middle-class society and wrote about the
problems that occur behind closed doors, the difficulties in relationships which
weren't supposed to be mentioned in public.
Take his masterpiece A Doll's House. Written in 1879, it was the first play to trace the
hypocrisy of Victorian middle-class marriage and ends with the heroine walking out
on her husband. Explosive stuff then - but hardly likely to cause a public outcry these
days.
However, Bryony Lavery's new adaptation substitutes amazement for shock when
Nora Helmer decides to leave. She seems so dependent on other people that making
her own way in the world without someone to lean on is totally unthinkable.
Unlike Thomas Ostermeier who took his 21st century German production of A Doll's
House to the Barbican last week, Rachel Kavanaugh's version is set in Ibsen's time.
Although Lavery has gone for rougher, more conversational language than the
customary translations, she's not opted for a complete rewrite, believing that Ibsen
really knows how plays work. That means the production is never allowed to drag and
the evening doesn't seem too long despite its three-hour duration.
A Doll's House looks at the marriage of Nora, a supposedly loving wife and
wonderful mother, and Torvald who has landed a decent job, finally giving the family
financial security. But as characters from the past enter their cheerful home, cracks
gradually appear in the couple's relationship and an intense struggle develops between
love and truth, honour and betrayal, and finally between an old-fashioned husband
and a disobedient wife.
Tara Fitzgerald is magnificent as Nora, the frivolous, irresponsible spendthrift.
Initially she appears almost shallow but becomes three-dimensional, an agitated,
anxious temptress who has a profound effect on everyone who knows her.
Tom Goodman-Hill is almost as impressive in the difficult role as her domineering
husband, a hard-nosed businessman whose level-headed exterior evaporates when he
encounters what he considers to be Nora's irrational behaviour. There is real tension
between them towards the end when their whole relationship changes.
There is a superb supporting cast including Jane Gurnett as the loyal loser-in-love Mrs
Linde; Richard Clothier as the manipulative Nils Krogstad who loans Nora money
and threatens to reveal her secret to her husband; and Peter Guinness as Dr Rank, the
dependable friend who confesses his love for Nora when he discloses that he is dying.
Designer Ruari Murchison's set is typically Scandinavian, a plain, middle-class home
in which Nora seems to be a doll - until she realises that she is first and foremost a
human being and her duty is to herself before being a wife and a mother.
For those who are studying A Doll's House, this is a new slant on one of Ibsen's most
successful works. For those who've never seen any of the Norwegian master's plays,
it's an excellent introduction to his repertoire.
Overall it's a fine piece of theatre with no weak link, although the night definitely
belongs to Tara Fitzgerald.
Lyn Gardner – The Guardian 2008
Up there with the finest, Erica Whyman's staging of Ibsen's great play is tough, robust
and remarkably even-handed. It could almost be articulating both sides of a staged
debate about what women really want in their relationships with men - a debate that,
like Nora's final slamming of the door, reverberates down the centuries.
Nora's exit from her marriage is an end, but also a beginning. Here, Tilly Gaunt's
Nora strides out of the living room; earlier, she had shuffled across it with such tiny
doll-like steps that it was as if her feet had been bound. We know, of course, that it is
her heart, soul and brain that have been hobbled by Torvald's suffocating love and her
own refusal to grow up.
The 1950s setting works very well; it is a period far enough away in time for the
stifling social code of Ibsen's play not to jar, but modern enough to connect with
today. Soutra Gilmour's startling design offers a wealth of period detail in a glass
house where all is visible and yet both husband and wife are blind to the truth about
their marriage.
The production feels short on pace, but it triumphantly presents every character in a
sympathetic light, without being bland. John Kirk's well-meaning but misguided
Torvold is no villain; indeed, initially it is the beautiful Nora - a self-conscious
spoiled child - who is the least appealing of the protagonists. You rather sympathise
with Kristine's look of exasperation when Nora suggests that her poverty-stricken
friend should not get a job but instead go on holiday to a spa. Gilmour's design points
up the Helmers' affluence, making it obvious that one person's poverty is another's
wealth.
It is superbly cast, too, right down to the smallest role.
Kirk is excellent; Gaunt is mesmerising, particularly in the erotic abandon of the
tarantella, which suggests the sensual woman she might be when freed from the
restrictions of her marriage. Karen Traynor as Kristine avoids priggishness; Chris
Myles' Kronstad exudes desperation; and James Woolley's Dr Rank radiates the quiet
pain of the unloved. Whyman, on the other hand, clearly loves these characters, warts
and all.
AS Byatt, The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009
Blaming Nora
With a new production of A Doll's House about to open at the Donmar in London, AS
Byatt looks again at Ibsen's tragic heroine - whose plight she once thought so
shocking - and finds her silly and insensitive
A Doll's House was, and is shocking. Halvdan Koht, an early biographer of Ibsen,
records that it "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life" and "pronounced a death
sentence on accepted social ethics". As a student, reading it for part of a tragedy
course, I was shocked in a way that was completely unexpected. I was quite happy for
the ethics of marriage to be put in question. But there is a Darwinian imperative (to do
with the selfish gene) that a woman should not leave her children. Nora shut the door,
and I was as perturbed as Ibsen could have hoped. When the play was first presented
in Germany in 1880, the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to act the final
scene, on the grounds that "I would never leave my children". Ibsen was forced to
write a different "happy ending", where Helmer forces Nora to the nursery door and
she sinks down helpless before it. This didn't please the public, and was eventually
abandoned.
A Doll's House explores the nature of women within society and its rules, but as Ibsen
insisted, it is not a play about the rights of women. Nora's story is part of a searching
exploration of the female at the turn of the century. She is silly like Madame Bovary,
confined in a house full of pointless "things". Tolstoy in many ways disliked Anna
Karenina, who was also silly, but he understood and wrote the terrible pain she felt in
being separated from her child because she had left her husband. At the time of the
play, Freud was asking "What do women want?" and finding no answer. "The ideal
wife is one who does everything that her ideal husband likes and nothing else," wrote
George Bernard Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in a chapter entitled "The
Womanly Woman": "Now to treat a person as a means to an end is to deny that
person's right to live."
Toril Moi, in her searching and splendid book, Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism,
takes us back to Hegel, whose description of human society had one set of ethical
imperatives for males, as social beings, and another for women, whose ethical
imperatives are seen entirely inside the small structure of the home, where they are
wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and not really individuals. What this produced, as
Moi explains, was a set of constructed "ideals" of love, fidelity, self-sacrifice and so
on, that constricted and deformed many human lives and selves.
Ibsen wrote A Doll's House in Amalfi in 1879. The previous winter in Rome he had
proposed that women be allowed to be present at the annual general meeting of the
Scandinavian Club, and that they should be made eligible to become librarians there.
"Is there anyone in this gathering who dares assert that our ladies are inferior to us in
culture or intelligence or knowledge or artistic culture?" The motion about the
librarianship was carried. The other was lost by one vote. Ibsen was furious. He left
the club, and returned to make a furious speech in which he inveighed against the
women who had intrigued against him on this question. "They had thrown his gift into
the mud. What kind of women are these? They are worse - worse that the dregs, worse
than scum." In 1898 he addressed the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in
Christiania. There he delivered a kind of manifesto:
"I have never written a poem or a play to further a social purpose. I have been more of
a poet and less of a social philosopher than most people seem inclined to believe. I
thank you for your good wishes, but I must decline the honour of being said to have
worked for the Women's Rights Movement. I am not even very sure what Women's
Rights really are."
Ibsen was interested in human beings, simply and dramatically. When Nora
announces that she is leaving Helmer, the following dialogue takes place:
Helmer: But to leave your home, your husband, your children! Have you thought
what people will say?
Nora: I can't help that. I only know that I must do this.
Helmer: But this is monstrous! Can you neglect your most sacred duties?
Nora: What do you call my most sacred duties?
Helmer: Do I have to tell you? Your duties towards your husband and your children.
Nora: I have another duty which is equally sacred.
Helmer: You have not. What on earth could that be?
Nora: My duty towards myself.
Helmer: First and foremost you are a wife and mother.
Nora: I don't believe that any more. I believe that I am first and foremost a human
being - like you - or anyway that I must try to become one.
"First and foremost a human being." Toril Moi says that Ibsen is the greatest dramatist
after Shakespeare, and one reason for his greatness is that he is interested in human
beings even more than he is interested in social constructs or systems of belief.
Helmer's and Nora's moral limitations, and their tragedy, are worked out in relation to,
and because of, the habits and beliefs of their times. But Ibsen is interested in the raw
human being also. He explores both nature and nurture.
There is a true story, in which Ibsen himself was involved, behind A Doll's House. It
is the story of Laura Kieler, who had written a novel in the 1860s, Brand's Daughters,
and got to know the Ibsens - Ibsen called her his "skylark". In 1878 she sent the
manuscript of another novel, hoping Ibsen would recommend it. He thought it was
very bad and said so. She needed money because she had borrowed - as Nora does in
the play - to take her tubercular husband to Italy to "save his life". On receiving
Ibsen's letter she forged a cheque, was discovered, and treated like a criminal by her
husband, who committed her to a lunatic asylum, taking her back only grudgingly.
In Rome, in 1878, Ibsen wrote "Notes for a Modern Tragedy", which describes the
moral frame of A Doll's House. He writes, among other things: "The wife in the play
ends up by having no idea what is right and what is wrong; natural feelings on one
hand and belief in authority on the other lead her to utter distraction"; "A woman
cannot be herself in modern society. It is an exclusively male society, with laws made
by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a
masculine standpoint"; "A mother in modern society, like certain insects, retires and
dies once she has done her duty by propagating the race." Laura Kieler, it should be
said, was very distressed by A Doll's House, as her situation was widely known.
The play was published in book form and sold a large number of copies. Ibsen made
most of his money from sales of books rather than stage performances - plays in those
days, even when successful, ran for only short periods. Its first English theatre
production was in 1889 with Janet Achurch as Nora. Before that there were two
private productions - one starring Eleanor Marx, with George Bernard Shaw as
Krogstad, and Eleanor's appalling partner, Edward Aveling, as Torvald. The play is
very different read as one would read a novel, to what it is when staged with a
beautiful and sympathetic actress as Nora.
This is because every time I read the play I find myself judging Nora with less and
less sympathy. The play is, as is frequently pointed out, flawlessly constructed - there
is not a wasted word, and every scene tightens the noose around Nora's neck. There is
a tragic inevitability to the way in which her "crime" is brought into the open. But
with the same momentum she displays a silliness and insensitivity that are also part of
her downfall. At the beginning she is lying to Torvald about the macaroons he has
forbidden and she has concealed. This could be comic but is part of a tissue of lies and
evasions that make up her life. Whether these lies are a function of social pressures or
Nora's own nature is left to us to determine. Hedda Gabler, another married woman
doomed to triviality, resorts to malice and cruelty. When Mrs Linde appears with her
tale of hardship and poverty, Nora flutters and fails to imagine what she is talking
about. She says "You must tell me everything" and immediately embarks on the
narrative of her own money problems - which are to do with a luxurious holiday for a
well-off couple, not the impossibility of making ends meet. She then speaks to
Krogstad, who lent her the money and is now in danger of losing his job at Helmer's
bank because of a comparable "indiscretion". Krogstad points out that she forged her
father's signature. Nora says she could not have told her dying father of the threat to
her husband's life.
Krogstad: Then you would have been wiser to have given up your idea of a holiday.
Nora: But I couldn't. It was to save my husband's life. I couldn't put it off.
Krogstad: But didn't it occur to you that you were being dishonest towards me?
Nora: I couldn't bother about that. I didn't care about you. I hated you because of all
the beastly difficulties you'd put in my way when you knew how dangerously ill my
husband was.
Here Nora is archetypally Hegel's woman, seeing things only in terms of her own
place in her own family. But she is also incapable - as a human being - of imagining
Krogstad.
One of the scenes I find most moving is Nora's brief exchange with Anne-Marie, the
nurse. Rich, or comfortably-off, women such as Nora are mothers - but all Nora does
with her children is romp before they are put to bed. Women like Nora relied on
women like Anne-Marie to do the basic mothering. And Anne-Marie, like so many
others, is, as she says, "a poor girl what's got into trouble and can't afford to pick and
choose." In Act II Nora asks her:
Nora: Tell me, Anne-Marie - I've so often wondered. How could you bear to give
your child away - to strangers?
Nurse: But I had to, when I came to nurse my little Miss Nora ...
Nora: But your daughter must have completely forgotten you.
Nurse: Oh no, indeed she hasn't. She's written to me twice, once when she got
confirmed and then again when she got married.
Nora is not really thinking about Anne-Marie - she is imagining the scenario if she is
forced to give up her own children. This has made her see Anne-Marie a little better.
Throughout A Doll's House there are reminders that there are fates and hardships
much worse than anything in the Helmer household, which is no more than a doll's
house. One of Helmer's most absurd and revealing moments is when he sneers at Mrs
Linde's knitting (on which she depends for a living) and tells her she should do
embroidery - "it's much prettier". "But knitting now - that's an ugly business - can't
help it. Look - arms all huddled up - great clumsy needles going up and down - makes
you look like a damned Chinaman."
Nora's insensitivity is at its starkest in her conversation with Dr Rank, who has come
to tell her he is dying. First she expresses "relief" when he tells her his bad news is
about himself. Then when he tells her that "within a month I may be rotting up there
in the churchyard", she says: "Ugh, what a nasty way to talk!" He persists - "As soon
as I know the worst, I'll send you a visiting card with a black cross on it, and then
you'll know that the final filthy process has begun." To which all Nora has to say is
that he is really being "quite impossible this evening. And I did hope you'd be in a
good mood." She tells him to laugh - he takes this as sympathetic black humour, but
the audience knows she needs to charm him into lending her the money to pay off
Krogstad. Instead of which he tells her that he loves her, and her feminine ethic
forbids her to ask him for the loan. It is dramatically complex and there are many
ways for an actress to negotiate it, requiring more or less sympathy from the watching
audience. But the truth is - however we sympathise with the trap she is in - Nora is not
a very sympathetic woman. Others - including other women made up by Ibsen would have had more human sympathy, more capacity for imagining other people.
Great tragedy asks us to care for flawed or even stupid people - Pentheus, Othello,
Macbeth - but the glory of A Doll's House is that it asks us to care for a small-minded
person, in the moment of her realisation of her own small-mindedness. The moment
when Nora dances the tarantella is one of the great moments of theatre. As Toril Moi
points out, the stage instruction that her hair should come down indicates that she is
seen as a sexual object by Rank and Helmer, the two watching men. The solo
tarantella, a wild dance as opposed to the stately courtly tarantella, is associated with
the "curative" tarantella, an uninhibited wild dancing, often days long, or danced until
the dancer drops, which was supposed to work out the poison of the bite of the
tarantula spider. Nora can express in her body the violence of her desperation, and
also her realisation that it is indeed desperation. Mrs Linde tells her that she is dancing
as if her life depended on it, and Nora replies tersely, "It does."
Helmer's response to her revelation of her forgery and its results is inadequate and
wounding. He, too, is a person of limited imagination. He too, I think, has a right to
our sympathy, a man trapped in a doll's house. However pompous he is, however
tooth-grating his cosseting of his "songbird", however much he is immersed in
mauvaise foi, the play is moving because he does love her and does not understand
her departure. Moi quotes the philosopher Stanley Cavell on this. "The final scene is
only harrowing if his live love for her is not denied. I have never seen it played so."
Moi adds: "Neither have I." All the parts are challenging for director and actors. It
will be exciting to see what the Donmar makes of the play.
A Doll's House, Repertory Theatre Birmingham
(Rated 2/ 5 )
Stunning period features
By Paul Taylor
Monday, 16 February 2004
The door in Ibsen's A Doll's House has banged shut so often it's a wonder that it's not off its
hinges. But just to remind you that this astonishing masterpiece, premiered in 1879, has lost
none of its freshness or pertinence, here are two high-profile productions that bear testimony
to the play's unflagging capacity to shock.
The door in Ibsen's A Doll's House has banged shut so often it's a wonder that it's not off its
hinges. But just to remind you that this astonishing masterpiece, premiered in 1879, has lost
none of its freshness or pertinence, here are two high-profile productions that bear testimony
to the play's unflagging capacity to shock.
Superficially, the more challenging and up-to-date version is the revival by Thomas
Ostermeier, the über-wunderkind director of Berlin's Schaubühne Theatre who introduced
Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane to Germany. But to see his startling play at the Barbican last
week immediately after Rachel Kavanaugh's more conventional production (starring Tara
Fitzgerald at Birmingham Rep) is an instructive experience. Ostermeier is intent on shooting
you between the eyes. Kavanaugh and her translator, the playwright Bryony Lavery, are
content to steal up on you unawares. I emerged from the Barbican feeling vaguely patronised.
I staggered from Birmingham Rep shaken to the core.
The German production takes the line that you have to find contemporary parallels in order
share the experience of the play's first audiences. So Nora and Torvald are reinvented as 21stcentury yuppies in a swish, achingly-hip multi-level apartment. Instead of the original pet
songbird, the heroine is the designer-dressed trophy-wife of a man more at ease with status
symbols than female emotions. Anne Tismer is a frenetic and insecure Nora, feeding the ego
of her husband (Jorg Hartmann) by groping his groin in public when she wants a favour or (as
a substitute for Ibsen's tarantella scene) hurling herself around like a Lara Croft-clone to an
electro-clash track on the hi-fi.
The staging has a crude, grotesque vigour, but it's founded on a fallacy. Instead of walking out
on the husband who has treated her as his play-thing and evinced more concern for his public
image than her, this heroine shoots him dead, firing bullet after bullet so that he winds up face
down in their tropical fish-tank. The production swathes the revolving set in huge digital
images of the children (Torvald treats his family as photo-opportunities) without showing the
remotest interest in them. In Ibsen's play, Nora agonises over whether a woman who does not
know herself can be a fit mother. Her exit leaves open the possibility that one day she will be
able to return and resume her motherly duties on a healthier footing. In the mistaken
assumption that it is offering a radical, contemporary alternative, this revival asks us to
believe that Nora would opt, in cold blood, for a self-defeating and melodramatic way out.
What kind of future will the children have now? Has this Nora never heard of divorce
settlements?
In the Birmingham Rep production, Tara Fitzgerald is magnificent in the later stages of the
drama when the newly-enlightened heroine confronts her husband with devastating home
truths. Janet McTeer, the greatest interpreter of the role I have seen, showed you a wife
infantilised by her stifling domestic set-up. But the supreme virtue of Kavanaugh's gripping
production and Bryony Lavery's insightful translation is an understanding that Torvald is a
prisoner of the doll's house too. You look down upon the husband in the German production
with steady, distanced loathing. You writhe in disturbed fellow-feeling with Tom GoodmanHill's masculine-role-playing hero. Kavanaugh's production convinces you that Ibsen was not
being coy when, at a banquet organised by the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights,
he declared that the play is wider than its feminist reputation. I saw this version at a matinée
packed with sixth formers who are studying A Doll's House at A-level. They cheered it to the
rafters, having come to see a set text and witnessing, in addition, the kind of masterpiece that
changes lives.
""A DOLL'S HOUSE" Theatre Royal, BRIGHTON
Mon 1 - Sat 6 March
The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen has been called the 'father of 20th century
drama.'
I think one could put up a spirited case for Chekhov or
Wilde but there is no denying Ibsen's powerful influence
on generations of writers with his naturalistic
dialogue/settings, giving a serrated edge to his choice of
themes.
"A Doll's House" is regarded by many as his most potently
realised work and a new [touring] adaptation by Bryony
Lavery is offered this week at the Theatre Royal, Brighton.
Set in the stylish bleached-pine home of Torvald Helmer,
his wife Nora is presented to us as a dutiful and cherished
'possession.'
Tara Fitzgerald
She is his 'squirrel', his 'little skylark', and a special 'Christmas robin'. Torvald,
however, is
unaware of Nora's simmering unhappiness that is suppressed by forms of retail
therapy.
But her economic dependency on Torvald becomes brutally clear.
.. It is played
with sensitivity
and pace with a
powerful
interpretation
from Tara
Fitzgerald as
'Nora'. She is at
the centre of the
storm and never
leaves it. The
performance is
magnetic...
Jeff Thomson
In this production the usually austere 'Torvald' (played by
Tom Goodman-Hill) is not immediately apparent: here he is
both charismatic and doting but he is unaware his 'little
chirrup' owes a considerable sum of money to the Bank he
is shortly to join! His seeming tenderness is to change.
Ibsen offers us a family drama that is multi-layered in
issues of male power, feminist reaction, perceived roles,
love and responsibility.
It is played with sensitivity and pace with a powerful
interpretation from Tara Fitzgerald as
'Nora'. She is at the centre of the storm and never leaves
it. The performance is magnetic.
It all ends unhappily - well, that could depend on a feminist viewpoint - but all in
the audience engaged in this production, left stunned.
Near to me was a class that had been taken 'to be done good to' - they seemed
less in awe and I doubt one young girl will ever go to the Theatre again; she was
so very, very bored!
A shame because there were many links to her and Nora on stage but then one
has to live a bit to fully value this classic play … and a classic production directed
by Rachel Kavanaugh.
JEFF THOMSON