Download Sharing A Doll`s House with Islamic Neighbours

Sharing A Doll’s House with Islamic
Neighbours
Julie Holledge
Flinders University
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This article critiques three productions of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House created within Islamic cultures, or for Muslim audiences, between 1994 and 2006.1 It
addresses a simple question: If the character of Nora is an icon of the first wave of the
European women’s movement and embodies the demand by women for the subjective freedom enjoyed by men in Western modernity, can it be adapted and shaped by
another set of cultural determinants to create a different but equally potent icon of
female emancipation? This question has a particularly relevance for the production
history of A Doll’s House within Islamic cultures, because it is in these cultures that a
colonial feminist discourse has been manipulated by British and American rulers to
justify imperial and colonial ambition.
From the British in nineteenth-century Egypt, to Operation Enduring Freedom
in Afghanistan, Western governments have “used the issue of women’s position in
Islamic societies as the spearhead of the colonial attack on those societies” (Ahmed
243). The conflation of the menace of terrorism, the Taliban and the torture of women
by Laura Bush, former First Lady, in her November 2001 radio address, is typical of a
colonial feminist discourse that justifies military intervention:
The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists…Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban
threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women
and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate cruelty, carried out by those who
seek to intimidate and control (qtd. in Russo 561).
This citing of cruelty towards women and children became, as Charles Hirschkind
and Saba Mahmood have convincingly argued, a convenient smoke screen to avoid
public debate about the role of American foreign policy in creating the conditions
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
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that had brought the Taliban to power (347).
Afghanistan and Laura Bush may appear to be a far cry from the concerns of cultural transmission and A Doll’s House, but they are closer than the reader might
imagine. Since 9/11, A Doll’s House has played a role in the soft diplomacy employed
by the West to engage with its Islamic other. Nora’s Sisters, the most generously
funded cultural program to be run by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
has been operational since 2006. In it, Norwegian Embassies host seminars with visiting Norwegian and local speakers to discuss issues of gender and equality. In most
cases, the seminar concludes with a performance of A Doll’s House produced by local
artists with Norwegian money. Islamic cities that have hosted Nora’s Sisters seminars
include Ramallah, Banda Aceh, and Cairo. A seminar was planned in Kabul but was
cancelled because of security concerns. The Nora’s Sisters program raises questions
about the efficacy of using a text so identified with Western feminism to begin a
dialogue with an Islamic other, particularly when the text itself is implicated in an
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orientalist discourse.
It may seem outlandish to suggest that a play enclosed within the bourgeois domestic world of nineteenth-century Norway contains a European orientalist discourse,
but there are traces of it deep within the fabric of the play. In Ibsen’s first draft of the
tarantella scene, Nora distracts Torvald from Krogstad’s letter by singing Anitra’s
song from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. This is a song of adoration, describing how Peer is
revealed as the Prophet, spreading light as he rides on his white horse across the North
African desert. As Nora sings, Torvald turns to Dr. Rank and says: “But we must have
cigarettes with it; real Turkish ones”; and the men sit and smoke, echoing the figure
of Peer listening to Anitra while reclining on cushions in his Arab Chieftain’s tent,
drinking coffee and smoking a long pipe. When Mrs Linde enters, Helmer says: “A
picture of family life. What do you say to it?”; Dr. Rank adds, “Turkish, but pretty is it
not?”. Mrs Linde agrees to plays the piano, and Nora dances, draped in her multiple
veil-like shawls. Torvald surveys her body, comments on “the fine curve of the neck”,
and concludes, “A wife is a good thing” (Perelli 122). Peer imagines his sexual slave
with “Veils etc. cast aside”(Peer 4:7 113): “Every inch and fibre of you/Must accept me
as its master./You shall have no will but mine” (Peer 4:7 116).
Ibsen’s orientalist diversion in Peer Gynt, and its echo within the first draft of A
Doll’s House, is clearly parodying the sexual fantasies of harems and slave girls found
in European literature from the late seventeenth century onwards.2 The scenes critique the unacceptable face of gendered power relations in the bourgeois households
of Northern Europe. However, by using these fantasies as the litmus test for male
supremacy, Ibsen feeds the binary of the colonial feminist discourse that contrasts
the supposed emancipation of women in Europe, with their implied powerlessness
in the Muslim world. The most offensive aspect of Ibsen’s rewriting of the orientalist
fantasy within Peer Gynt is Anitra’s misrecognition of Peer as the Prophet, which
illustrates the then European misperception that Islam was synonymous with decadence. All the references to Turkish cigarettes and Turkish families have disappeared
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from the final version of A Doll’s House, but in Torvald’s erotic fantasy of ravishing
the peasant girl from Southern Europe, there is an echo of Peer Gynt’s fantasy of a
sex slave from North Africa. And as Franco Perelli has pointed out, the Neapolitan
tarantella contains both Spanish and Arabian influences (120).
The binary structure that Ibsen uses to organise gender within his play creates a
negative polarity that attributes sexual manipulation to subaltern femininity, and
erotic fantasies of sexual mastery to bourgeois masculinity. It also creates a positive polarity that ties the dramatic action to the liberal secular assumption that all
human beings have an innate desire for liberty. If this binary is central to A Doll’s
House, can the play be re-located in an Islamic cultural framework? To investigate
this question, this article looks at three versions of A Doll’s House: a film version
from the Islamic Republic of Iran, directed by Dariush Mehrjui and released in 1993;
an Egyptian production that opened the National Theatre Festival in Cairo in 2006;
and a 2004 Dutch theatre production, directed by Gerrit Timmers and performed in
156 Arabic in the Netherlands by actors from Marrakech. All these productions were created by male directors in contexts where censorship was applied, or invoked, over the
representation of female sexuality; and in cultures with a past or present history of
colonial feminist discourse. I have concentrated on the adaptations authored by the
three directors, rather than on the performances of the three Noras by Niki Karimi,
Eiman El Eman, and Saadia Ladib. A short background briefing will preface the discussion of each production. The various comparative threads that link the versions of
the play will be considered in the conclusion.
‘Bad Hejabi’ Days in the Suburbs of Tehran
It is ironic that Sara, the most critically acclaimed of all the film versions of A Doll’s
House, was produced in Iran during Ayatolleh Khomeini’s rule-and that in it Nora
is veiled. The Director/scriptwriter Dariush Mehrjui, a major figure of new Iranian
cinema, renamed Nora as Sara, and relocated her in an old suburb of Tehran.3
Secular liberal feminism is firmly associated in Iran with Western imperialism
because the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), a regime supported by British Intelligence
and the CIA, introduced legislation improving the status of women as part of its
modernisation program. Women were given the vote, but for elections that were boycotted for lack of genuine opposition parties.4 The Pahlavi dynasty was eventually
overthrown by a coalition made up of bourgeois, nationalist, and Marxist-Leninist
parties, as well as religious activists-and women were active participants throughout the mass movement (Shahidian 8). It took several years for the Islamic Republic
to silence the secular elements of this coalition.
In a society where it is illegal for a woman to show anything other than her face
and hands in public, the representation of the female body on the stage or in film
is problematic.5 Sara was released in 1993, when theatre as a public art form was
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Fig. 1
Sara. Directed by D. Mehjuri, producted by H. Seifi and D. Mehrjui. Farabi Cinema
Foundation, Tehran. 1993.
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banned and film was (and still is) controlled by pre- and post-production censorship. The early nineties were a time of political uncertainty, following the Ayatolleh
Khomeini’s death in 1989. The morality police, or komiteh, had enormous powers
and used them indiscriminately, particularly against women who were arrested for
letting a strand of hair escape their headscarves, a crime known as ‘bad hejabi’, or for
travelling alone, or being seen in public with a man who was not a relative, or wearing slippers in the street. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote of the
komiteh during this period: “they harassed people because they felt like it, looked for
pretexts to intimidate them, and, when they found none, made them up…before you
knew it, you were three days into an interrogation, being accused of anything from
adultery to treason” (99). As a human rights lawyer, Ebadi succeeded in improving
the legal status of women and children by arguing over interpretations of the Qur’an
and the life of the Prophet: “Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can
be interpreted to oppress women and it can be interpreted to liberate them…If I’m
158 forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources
that stress the egalitarian ethics of Islam, then so be it” (122).
Just as Ebadi worked through Islamic jurisprudence to create legislation to improve
the position of women, so Mehrjui, worked through the framework of Islamic family
law to create his adaptation of A Doll’s House. In Iran, marriage is regarded as a contract in which women can insert divorce clauses, subject to their husband’s approval
(Karmi 75). Men may marry up to four times, take mistresses as temporary wives,
and can divorce with comparative ease. Child custody rights favour the father. Under
Article 1170, a mother is given custody of her daughter until the age of seven, and
of her son until the age of two; if she remarries she loses all rights over her children
(Mir-Hosseini 67). In Mehrjui’s film, Hessam (Helmer) tries to separate Sara from
her daughter; she defies her husband and insists on taking her three year-old with
her when she leaves her doll’s house. Divorce is a possibility for Hessam; he threatens
never to return to his home after reading Goshtasb’s letter at the bank. Sara never
suggests that she will divorce Hessam, only that she will return to her father’s home.
During the early nineties, female characters in Iranian films were idealised to conform to notions of Islamic purity. Mehrjui’s Nora had to be morally correct. As the
dramatic action of the film focuses on the blackmail plot, the intrigue at the bank and
the double letters from Goshtasb (Krogstad), Sara’s forgery of her father’s signature is
essential to the plot. But with the exception of this single act of folly, justified by her
devotion to her sick husband, every other blemish is removed from her character. A
suggestion that Sara might have committed adultery to secure the loan is dismissed
as preposterous. Sara does not flirt with her husband, and Dr Rank has disappeared
from the story. There is no hint in Hessam of Helmer’s sexual fantasies, and the tarantella rehearsal is substituted with a party celebrating his promotion at the bank.
At this gathering, it is the men who dance and the women who watch; a close-up of
Sara shows her gently swaying to the music as a tear falls from her eye. If there is any
lingering doubt in the audience’s mind regarding Sara’s honesty, a scene is inserted
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in the bazaar where she demonstrates her financial integrity. At the height of her torment, in the middle of the night as Hessam sleeps, Sara kneels in silent prayer.
This might suggest that Sara has more in common with Chaucer’s Patient Griselda
than Ibsen’s heroine, but there is another more subversive text in the visual and emotional layers of this film. Shirin Ebadi described public space in Iran in the early
nineties as a “charged and potentially hostile realm” (180), and there is a sense in the
film that outside the home women are subject to constant surveillance; when Sima
(Mrs Linde) and Sara stand together ‘immodestly’ laughing in the street, a car accelerates towards them, splattering Sima with water from the gutter. But the response
of the women to this anonymous aggression is more laughter, and it is this constant
avoidance of the pitfalls of melodrama that stops the female characters of Sara and
Sima dwindling into martyrdom. In all the confrontation scenes between the men
and women there is something comical about the male posturing; the women dismiss these tantrums with impatience and irritation. Finally, there is an incredible
energy and resilience in Niki Karimi’s performance as Sara, as she strides through 159
the streets of Tehran with hejab flying, attempting to solve the blackmail plot.
Two devices frame the film: sickness and sight. Hessam lies in hospital in the prologue, but he is brought back to health through Sara’s actions; as the film ends, he is
sick once again, but this time he must heal himself. Paralleling Hessam’s sickness
is Sara’s faulty vision: she has partially lost her sight through her secret labours as a
seamstress, but her symbolic blindness can only be cured through her realisation of
Hessam’s true nature. This double structure of sickness and sight implies that both
characters will have to change in order to move forward. Or as Sara says in her final
line: “we have to change a lot before we know where we are going”. Moving forward
together, these characters will resolve their differences within an Islamic framework.
It can be argued that the solution to the problem within their relationship lies in
one of the most disputed of the Qur’anic verses, the gaymuma, which is interpreted
either as giving men authority over women, or the financial responsibility for their
well-being (Karmi 74). Mehrjui’s film succeeds in eliding the inherent bias towards
liberal secular feminism in Ibsen’s text; and undermines the play’s binary structure
by removing explicit sexuality and reaffirming the value of religious belief. The film
succeeds in challenging the systemic gender inequalities within the Islamic Republic
of Iran, but the extent of this challenge is circumscribed by state censorship, not only
of the narrative, but also of the visual representation of female characters.
Snow Falling in Alexandria
A Doll’s House was first performed in Cairo at the Khedivial Theatre in 1892; it starred
Janet Achurch and was the original Novelty Theatre production from London.6 Lord
Cromer, the British Consul-General in Egypt, is unlikely to have accepted his invitation to the opening night. In Britain, Ibsen was the darling of the suffragists, and
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Fig. 2
A Doll’s House. Directed by Gamal Yakout. First performed at the Cultural Palaces’
Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre, Alexandria, June, 2006.
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Cromer supported the other side; he was to become the President of the Men’s League
for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in 1909. His hostility to women’s emancipation in
Britain did not prevent him from advocating colonial feminism in Egypt, where he
declared that the seclusion of women and the practice of veiling was “the fatal obstacle” to “mental and moral development” of Egyptians (Ahmed 153). Apparently, it
was not the separate spheres of men and women that Cromer disliked, but the oriental veil that hid Egyptian women from Western eyes.
The first Arabic performance of A Doll’s House was broadcast on official Egyptian
radio sometime between 1957 and 1962, along with ten other plays by Ibsen.
According to Nehad Selaiha, theatre critic from the Al Ahram Weekly, the play was not
performed on stage because it seemed “pallid and tamely conservative to the women
of the 1960s generation who underwent military training in schools” (July 2006). The
play may have been considered pallid in the sixties, but in June 2006, a company of
unknown actors from Alexandria presented A Doll’s House at the Cultural Palaces’
Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre and had a popular success. The production transferred
to a larger venue, and was invited to Cairo to open the first National Theatre Festival.
The Festival program included thirty-seven of the best professional, commercial,
independent, and amateur theatre productions seen in Egypt in the previous two
years. On the final night of the Festival, a panel of judges gave three awards to the
Alexandria production: best newcomer director to Gamal Yakout; best newcomer
actress to Eiman El Eman for her performance as Nora: and best design to Sobhi El
Said.
What made A Doll’s House so vivid in the Egypt of 2006? Was there a new identity
space created for women by the Islamic revival visible in the Alexandrian adaptation
of A Doll’s House? Or was it an aspect of women’s lives in the rural areas, where it
is still possible to find high levels of illiteracy, infant mortality, honor killings and
genital mutilation? Or was it the contradictions between the influence of women in
the workforce, and the recent outbreak of sexual harassment on the street? Or perhaps more pertinent to the play, the resistance of Islamic family law to change, with
polygamy and easy divorce for men, and restrictions on divorce and child custody
for women?
On the surface it would seem that none of these referents to the lives of Egyptian
women had any bearing on Gamal Yakout’s interpretation. His production creates
a romantic “Christmas card,” quasi-period, quasi-European world with twinkling
lights and snow, bathed in vivid colours: the exterior a deep violet blue, and the
interior warm pinks and oranges.7 The lattice wood design provides an illusion of
a transparent fragile glasshouse. This set is a visual metaphor; it has nothing to do
with realist conventions. “Transparency constitutes a major issue in this production”,
Yakout argues, and it is only transparency that can “terminate the cycle of deceit and
complicity besetting this household” (Selaiha July 2006).
The blackmail plot is played at a cracking pace, the whole performance taking just
over an hour. Emotions are close to the surface and reinforced by a sound track of
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everything from jingle bells to operatic choirs and melodramatic chords that heighten
suspense. There is no space here for reflection of introspection, and the characters are
boldly typed: the charming energetic wife, the melancholic women with a past, and
the authoritarian and dominating husband. As the villain, Krogstad is the most complex of all the characters.
Nora is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstance, and once again her relationship with Dr Rank and the sexual complexities of the silk stocking scene are
excised from the text. Nora’s inner crisis is removed from the rehearsal of the tarantella and reinterpreted as a fantasy sequence in which she manages to unlock the
letterbox and rip Krogstad’s letter to pieces. As she throws the pieces of paper into
the air, laughing and dancing with joy, hundreds of letters fall around her like the
snow outside the windows. In the final scene, her eyes are opened as she realises
that her husband is, in the director’s words, a “morally dysfunctional person”.8 She is
filled with a self-righteous anger that transforms her from the child of her husband/
162 father, to the censorious mother of her husband/son. But when she makes her final
exit into the snow, in her romantic pink dress and hat, she leaves the door ajar. Yakout
feels that this action allows for Nora’s possible failure, Helmer’s possible change, or
another unforeseen outcome. Nehad Selaiha suggests the ending is true to the spirit
of Mediterranean culture “where women invariably forgive, or overlook, the silly
foibles of men and never take quite seriously what they say” (Salaiha Aug. 2006).
Yet this production is not about Mediterranean women in the twenty-first century, any more than it is about Norwegian women in the nineteenth. There is no
re-working of an icon of women’s emancipation from the West to the Arab world,
and it is clear form his program notes that Yakout’s interest is in Helmer’s social
hypocrisy rather than Nora’s demand for subjective freedom: “Divine laws, manmade laws, social traditions, the human conscience, ethics, societal codes, etc.…We
trust each other’s words as long as they do not go beyond words. When it comes down
to actions, we realise how false the words were” (Yakout).
Yakout was applauded by Abala el-Ruweiny, the critic from El Akhbar, for placing
“the cause of the woman” outside his interpretation of A Doll’s House and concentrating on “denouncing falseness”. El Robi, the El Karama critic, went straight to the
heart of the matter: “it is the conflict between Nora the human being, and Helmer the
society…We suffer from a disease which has infected our social political and cultural
life for many years, this is disease is the ‘schizophrenia’ or splitting: this disease is
embodied in the clear contradiction between speech and action.” At the time of the
performance, the clearest expression of this public schizophrenia was the government’s position over the question of Palestine. The then Egyptian President, Hosni
Mubarak, was regarded by many in the Arab world as a puppet of the American
government. In the year that A Doll’s House was performed, there were over eight
hundred strikes and anti-government demonstrations linking Mubarak’s failure to
support the Palestinian cause with a wide range of domestic issues. All the Arabic
reviews of the Alexandria production of A Doll’s House treat the production as a
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political allegory. The outer layer of the blackmail plot remains, but the inner layer
of Nora’s psychological struggle for identity has been replaced with a critique of state
power and religious hypocrisy that is visible to an audience trained to read between
the lines by an ever present state censorship of the arts, media, and education.
Fixing Furniture in Rotterdam
Onafhankelijk Toneel (O.T., or ‘Independent Theatre’) is based in Rotterdam, the
second biggest city in the Netherlands, a country with a population of nearly one
million Muslims. The city invested the equivalent of 400 million US dollars in
the mid-nineties to implement a multicultural arts agenda; and OT, led by Gerrit
Timmers and Mirjam Koen, became a model for European multicultural theatre.9 A
Doll’s House was just one of the O.T. productions performed in Arabic by Moroccan
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actors during the ten years between 1995 and 2004.
In the nineties, O.T. built a solid Dutch Arab audience through migrant networks,
students, and local media, but as the century turned, they ran into problems. Gerrit
Timmers had commissioned the Algerian-French writer, Assia Djebar, to write a
libretto based on her novel Far from Medina. Djebar focused the opera Aisha and the
Women of Medina on a famous incident involving the Prophet’s young wife, Aisha,
who was falsely accused of adultery. Shortly before rehearsals for the opera were due
to begin, an Islamic group in the Netherlands made a complaint to the Moroccan
Government about the representation on stage of the family of the Prophet. Moroccan
cast members contacted Timmers and asked him to remove the character of Aisha
from the opera. It was an impossible request: “it would be like doing Hedda Gabler
without Hedda Gabler on stage!” (Timmers).10 The production was cancelled and the
press got hold of the story. Timmers explains: “I stated over and over again that we
had not received a single threat. But of course, journalists only want to hear that
there is an Islamic danger in the Netherlands” (Bouanani). O.T. called a meeting to
discuss the cancellation; the theatre was packed with “people in traditional clothing,
politicians, preachers, the white and Arab community”. There was a clash within the
Moroccan community about theatre and representation but “it was all done with an
open heart and no one felt threatened”. With hindsight, Timmers feels that the conference “was more valuable than the production”.
Two years later, in April 2002, when O.T.’s production of A Doll’s House opened,
fears of an Islamic danger in the Netherlands had skyrocketed. The production began
its tour a couple of months after the first of two events that became known as the
Dutch 9/11 (Kooijman 120). First, Pim Fortuyn, a sociology professor turned populist
politician, was assassinated in Hilversum nine days before a general election. He had
been standing on a strong anti-immigration platform, arguing that the Netherlands
was formed out of Christianity, Humanism, and the Enlightenment, and that Islam
was antipathetic to Dutch culture. He had cited inequality between the sexes, and
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Fig. 3
Nora. Directed by Gerrit Timmers. First performed by Onafhankelijk Toneel,
Rotterdam, 17 Apr. 2002.
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intolerance of homosexuality within Islamic cultures as the most obvious examples
of cultural incompatibility. As a gay man, he had declared his intention of defending
homosexuals from the Islamisation of the Netherlands.11
There was a collective sigh of relief in the Netherlands when it was revealed that
Pim Fortyun’s murderer was an animal rights activist with no Islamic connections,
but exactly 911 days later, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam
by a radical Dutch Muslim.12 The two murders triggered a re-examination of the celebrated multicultural tolerance of the Netherlands. Sexuality became a central issue
in this debate. To create a version of A Doll’s House for Dutch Moroccans in this
political climate, and avoid the charge that the production was designed to teach
Muslims about gender equality, was a complex theatrical task. Amidst heated debates
about national identity, the failure of multiculturalism, and the need for migrant
assimilation, Timmers and his Moroccan actors from the Atelier Tensift company
in Marrakech transformed Ibsen’s play into a charming, light hearted, hour-long
entertainment with performances bordering on the ‘edge of boulevard comedy’ 165
(Zonneveld).
They set the play in the home of a Dutch Moroccan family living in Rotterdam:
it has a North African aesthetic, with ornate furniture, candelabra, and red plush
furnishing. This is a pop-up two-dimensional home with objects from the world
of farce. On Nora’s first entrance, the front door falls off its hinges; when Saaida
(Mrs Linde) appears, candelabra drop to the floor; Mohktar’s (Krogstad) disturbance
causes the curtains to crash; and when Nora decides to leave her children the family
photographs disintegrate. This mayhem reveals the fragility of Nora’s domestic
world, and her constant labour to hold the family together. Time and time again,
when the text moves towards unpalatable fears and anxieties, the breaking furniture
releases the dramatic tension. In the final moments of the play, as Nora leaves her
doll’s house, she throws her keys onto the ornament shelves; the whole edifice collapses and she exits to audience laughter. This physical farce may lighten the play, but
it is juxtaposed with a serious critique of Moroccan patriarchy.
Traditionally, the Moroccan family creates a strong divide between male and
female social spheres. Until the recent family law was passed in Morocco, Moroccan
women were denied the right to divorce or inherit (WLP). The first wave of Moroccan
guest workers arrived in the Netherlands in the nineteen-sixties. The men travelled
alone, leaving their families in Morocco until the Dutch authorities gave permission
for the migration of dependents. Many of the women came from rural areas where
educational opportunities were limited. When they arrived in the Netherlands, they
tended not to enter the workforce, and the traditional separation between the sexes
was recreated in the new environment. In the mid-nineties, a study conducted in the
Netherlands showed that young men of Moroccan descent wanted to marry virgins,
and they assumed that their wives would accept their authority in the home (Pels 82).
While the O.T. production challenged these attitudes, it was careful to avoid creating negative stereotypes of the male characters. Medhi (Torvald) expresses his
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opinions forcefully, and assumes his natural right to patriarchal authority, but he
is devoted to his child wife. Even Mokhtar (Krogstad), at the height of his oppressive blackmail fantasy, eats an ice cream like an arrogant teenager. According to
Timmers, there were still men in the audience who left during the performance; if
they stayed, they tended to sigh, while the women laughed and applauded.
On the surface this is a thoroughly secular production: Christmas is being celebrated as a public holiday, and there are no decorations in the house. Equally, there
are no visual indications that this is a family of practicing Muslims. Although explicit
references to religion have been avoided, this adaptation is still deeply influenced
by traditional Islamic values, particularly with regard to sexuality. Nora’s honour is
unblemished, and any possibility of immodesty, or immorality, has been cut. Only
a fraction of the erotic play between Nora and Mehdi survives and most of the relationship between Nora and Dr Rank has gone. Instead of syphilis, Rank dies from an
unnamed cancer.
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The danger of imposing a Western paradigm of women’s emancipation on a
Muslim community is particularly acute in this production. When Nora leaves home
to find a flat and get a job in Rotterdam, it might appear that she is rejecting her
own culture and claiming an identity space defined by her white Dutch sisters. This
possible interpretation is subverted by Nora’s costuming during the final scene with
Mehdi. In the Ibsen text, Nora leaves the stage to take off her tarantella costume and
returns in her ordinary clothes to confront Torvald. In the Dutch Moroccan version,
Nora stays in the traditional Berber costume for the entire third act. While the decision was pragmatic (the edited text left no time for her to leave the stage and change),
the visual impact of Nora confronting her husband dressed as a Berber reaffirms the
fact that women from non-Western cultures have their own proto-feminist traditions
to draw on in the struggle for gender equality.
A Tale in Three Cities
Tehran, Alexandria, and Rotterdam are three cities with totally different social and
cultural lives, but there are interesting commonalities in the versions of A Doll’s
House produced by their artists. In every case the plot line of loans, forgery, blackmail, and accountability, remains close to Ibsen’s text. The economies of these cities
range from a port in post-industrial Europe, to a port in a developing economy
dependent on foreign investment, to the capital of an oil rich theocratic state, yet
the dramatic action surrounding the transfer of money remains identical. It would
appear that in each city, a wife borrowing to get medical treatment for her husband,
naively committing a forgery to secure the loan, paying off the debt through some
kind of casual employment, and being rejected by her husband for dishonesty, is a
plausible narrative.
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While the blackmail plot remains largely unchanged, all of the productions make
drastic cuts to the sexual content of the play. In the original text, power circulates in
the domestic environment through sex, just as power circulates in the outside world
through money. The silk stocking scene, the character of Dr Rank, the tarantella,
Torvald’s erotic fantasies, and the sexualised game playing between husband and
wife are either totally removed or minimised in all these versions. Eliminating sexual
display and flirtatious behaviour from the text removes the only form of agency available to the character of Nora prior to the final confrontation; but it also trounces the
orientalist discourse embedded in the text that attributes a decadent sexuality to an
Islamic other.
The second major excision from these adaptations is the critique of patriarchal
religion. This is achieved largely by cutting the dialogue in which Nora reveals to
Torvald that she intends to re-examine her religious belief. Removing religious
doubt from the play destabilises the binary that underpins the construction of male
supremacy; the unequal power relations in the home are dependent on a religious 167
belief that encourages women to put their trust in god-like husbands. Once religious
doubt has been removed from the text, the social background of patriarchal religion
becomes hegemonic, and any implied secularism is lost from the new paradigm of
gender relations foreshadowed in the final scene.
If sexuality, religious doubt, and secularism are removed from the play, what is put
in their place; and can we find icons of female emancipation emerging from this new
content? Overt sexuality is replaced in these versions with innate modesty, particularly in the development of the characterisation of Nora. It is difficult not to interpret
this modesty as the containment of female desire, symptomatic of cultures with a
deep-seated belief that a man’s honour is embodied in the virtue of his wife. The
possibility that female agency can be tied to the practice of piety is alien to secular
feminist thinking, and yet it is precisely this possibility that is the subject of Saba
Mahmood’s fascinating study, Politics of Piety, of the women’s mosque movement in
Cairo. This grass roots movement engages in a religious practice designed to produce
a subjective agency through the self-discipline of an ethical practice. This is not to
suggest that Yakout’s Nora, or her Dutch Moroccan and Iranian sisters, represent
identity spaces inhabited by participants of the Egyptian mosque movement, merely
that the rejection of a husband on moral grounds does concur with the teachings of
the moderate faction of the piety movement. Mahmood records a women dã‘iyãt,
or teacher, in a local mosque arguing that: “Only when the nature of a husband’s
conduct is such that it violates key Islamic injunctions and moral codes, making it
impossible for a woman to realize the basic tenets of virtuous conduct in her own and
her children’s lives, is she allowed to resort to divorce’ (187).
Virtuous Noras may not question the basis of religious faith, nor infer a connection between patriarchy in the home and in the mosque, but they are still capable
of challenging Islamic family law. Their departures from the doll’s houses seem to
signal a re-negotiation, rather than a termination, of marriage contracts. Pre-nuptial
crcl june 2011 juin rclc
contracts fit within Islamic family law; thus renegotiation can fit within the same
framework. In the Iranian film, Sara returns to her father’s house to consider the
future, not to begin a new life; in Alexandria, the door is left open to allow for a
number of possibilities. Gerrit Timmers’ account of the end of one of the O.T. performances gives a hint of the sentiments that might inform these contractual changes:
It was a special performance for women, we had organised a crèche next door for the
children. The word miracle has strange connotations in Arabic, so at the end of the
play Mehdi says, “I’ll wait until she comes back”. One of the women called out, “Then
you have to take better care of her”, and the actor replied, like a typical Moroccan
man, “Then she has to take better care of me”. The audience started to sing a popular
marriage song, “You have to take care of her, You have to take care of him”. It was very
touching.
It is arguable whether these Noras, with their re-negotiation of Islamic family law
and moral agency, can be described as icons of women’s emancipation. For Yakout
168 the issue is irrelevant; for Mehrjui, in an Iran plagued by morality police, even a
slight shift in gender boundaries was a major victory; and for Gerrit Timmers, subtle
subversion is the most appropriate strategy for fighting the cultural wars in the
Netherlands: “My aim is not to shock my audiences, but to seduce them.”
Alexandria, Rotterdam and Tehran are all cities in which conflicts over gender
relations have polarised Islamic and liberal secular politics, yet none of these versions of A Doll’s House has been appropriated to impose a Western secular feminist
discourse. Instead, they demonstrate that it is possible for this play to transcend its
cultural origins and become a flexible template for the creation of new performance
texts. These versions have transformed Ibsen’s social drama into a realist film in Iran;
a farce in Rotterdam; and a magical realist world in Alexandria. Rather than being
constrained by a European classic, these three directors and their actors have manipulated the global respectability of A Doll’s House to create original performance texts
that speak directly to their audiences, while still avoiding the eyes and ears of state
and religious censors.
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Notes
1. The stimulus for this article was a global mapping project on the production history of A Doll’s House
that revealed a significant increase in production in Islamic cultures since 9/11, a number of which
have been funded by the soft diplomacy of the Norwegian Government.
2. While I think Ibsen is using an orientalist fantasy to critique the power relations within the Helmer
household, this image is still inflected with a particular Scandinavian flavour. The Danish bourgeosie
created Turkish smoking rooms in their houses and received guests dressed in oriental costumes
(Hansen: 1996) Elixabeth Oxfeldt has pointed out in her fascinating study Nordic Orientalism: Paris
and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800-1900 (Copenhagen: 2005), that orientalism has a very specific Nordic history with regard to the emergence of the national imaginary.
3. Mehrjui won the Golden Seashell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival for the direction of
Sara; Niki Karimi won Best Actress for her performance in the title role. The same year, Sara won the
Audience Award at the Nantes Three Continents Festival. It is one of four films with strong central
female characters made by Mehrjui between 1992 and 1997.
J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours
4. The second Pahlavi Shah maintained his power-base for 25 years with the aid of Savak, the political
police force. The Shah persecuted anyone who attempted to oppose him. Five thousand people died
and 50,000 were forced into exile. Savak had 60,000 people working as informers and was known for
its brutality. Over (US) $2,000 million was exported annually from Iran during 1973-8; half of this
amount belonged to the Pahlavi extended family (Hiro 95).
5. The struggle over the politics of clothing, and particularly the clothing of women, has always been
particularly strong in Iran. For an extended discussion on the costuming of Sara, see Holledge and
Tompkins (37-43).
6. The London production was returning to Britain via Batavia, Ceylon, India, and Egypt after a twoyear colonial tour of Australia and New Zealand. The Batavia performance of the play is the first
recorded in an Islamic culture, and the Cairo season is the second.
7. The children’s costumes are contemporary party clothes, but Nora and Helmer are dressed in outfits
usually associated with weddings: a full length dress with lace decorations, and tail coat with open
necked white shirt, exaggerated collar and romantic full sleeves. The maid is in the uniform of a
nineteenth-century servant in white cap and apron, and Mrs Linde wears a straw hat. This combination of period elements, together with the fairy tale setting, distances the production from any sense
of verisimilitude to Norway in the nineteenth century.
8. All the quotations from Gamal Yakout in this article are taken from an unpublished personal statement regarding his artistic intentions written for the purposes of this article. I have to thank Mona
Khedr, the Egyptian research assistant on this project, not only for her assistance in obtaining this
document but also for the translating of the Arabic reviews of the production. She also provided
feedback on the various drafts of this article. For an excellent discussion of Muslim identity in contemporary Egyptian theatre, see Kehr (2009).
9. Kees Weeda, the bureaucrat responsible for the Rotterdam multicultural arts policy, encouraged artists to draw on a broad range of cultural references: “Thirty percent of our population is inspired by
non-Western civilization…producers of theater (sic) must read not only the ancient Greeks but also
the ancient Arabs. Then you’re producing art for everyone in this city, and encouraging integration
of people from different cultures. That’s our policy goal” (Dorsey).
10. I would like to thank Eugene Van Erven for helping me to arrange this interview.
11. Fortuyn’s justification for his party’s anti-immigration platform is a perfect illustration of Talal
Asad’s assertion that: “For both liberals and the extreme right the representation of ‘Europe’ takes
the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam” (165).
12. Attached to van Gogh’s body was a death threat addressed to the Somali activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
the scriptwriter on van Gogh’s latest film, Submission. The film, which had been shown two months
before on Dutch public television, was structured in the form of a Muslim woman’s prayer intercut
with images of badly beaten and raped women. On their naked flesh, signs of male violence were visible alongside quotations about the rightful place of women in Islam (Buruma 176).
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