A Doll's House

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'I think I'm a human being before anything else. I don't care what other people say. I don't care what people write in books. I need to think for myself.'

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered in 1879 in Copenhagen, the second in a series of realist plays by Ibsen, and immediately provoked controversy with its apparently feminist message and exposure of the hypocrisy of Victorian middle-class marriage. In Ibsen's play, Nora Helmer has secretly (and deceptively) borrowed a large sum of money to pay for her husband, Torvald, to recover from illness on a sabbatical in Italy. Torvald's perception of Nora is of a silly, naive spendthrift, so it is only when the truth begins to emerge, and Torvald appreciates the initiative behind his wife, that unmendable cracks appear in their marriage.

This compelling new version of Ibsen's masterpiece by playwright Simon Stephens premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, on 29 June 2012. It was updated with minor changes in 2013.

One of the best-known, most frequently performed of modern plays, "A Doll's House" richly displays the genius with which Henrik Ibsen pioneered modern, realistic prose drama. In the central character of Nora, Ibsen epitomized the human struggle against the humiliating constraints of social conformity. Nora's ultimate rejection of a smothering marriage and life in "a doll's house" shocked theatergoers of the late 1800s and opened new horizons for playwrights and their audiences.
But daring social themes are only one aspect of Ibsen's power as a dramatist. "A Doll's House" shows as well his gifts for creating realistic dialogue, a suspenseful flow of events and, above all, psychologically penetrating characterizations that make the struggles of his dramatic personages utterly convincing. Here is a deeply absorbing play as readable as it is eminently playable, reprinted from an authoritative translation.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian writer and theatre director who lived from 20 March 1828 to 23 May 1906. He is credited with helping to build modernism in theatre. His best-known works are Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Emperor and Galilean, and A Doll's House. In Skien, Norway, Henrik Johan Ibsen was born into a wealthy merchant family. His forefathers were mostly wealthy city merchants and shipowners or members of the Upper Telemark "aristocracy of officials." Ibsen quit school when he was fifteen. Henrik Wergeland and Peter Christen Asbjrnsen and Jrgen Moe's Norwegian folktales served as inspiration for him. Under the alias "Brynjolf Bjarme," he published his first play, Catilina (1850), but it was never staged. He would only make a few trips to Norway during the following 27 years, spending most of them in Germany and Italy.After suffering many strokes, Ibsen passed away at his house at Arbins gade 1 in Kristiania (now Oslo) in March 1900. He was laid to rest at Oslo's Vr Frelsers Gravlund, often known as "The Graveyard of Our Savior." Ibsen exclaimed "On the contrary" ("Tvertimod!") as his final words before passing away.

Simon Stephens's agile new version [is] . . . quick and clear and full of subtle touches
A sensible, sensitive and spirited version . . . that chimes with the debt-laden times we're trapped in and poses still-pressing questions
The supple new version of the text by Simon Stephens is [a] great plus point . . . in this definitive take on a classic
An astute, often savagely funny version by Simon Stephens . . . And as the doll at the play's heart and hearth cracks like porcelain and the woman emerges, it's with a force that's shattering.
Simon Stephens's new English-language version of the text . . . makes the characters' anxieties feel contemporary despite the period dress. "Feminism" may not have been in Ibsen's vocabulary, but he was undoubtedly concerned with the roles we all play and why.