Torvald: Nora, I would gladly work for you night and day, and endure sorrow and hardship for your sake. But no man can be expected to sacrifice his honour, even for the person he loves. Nora: Millions of women have done it.
The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, is a considerable distance from AKS. Just ask this year’s Year 13 English Literature group, who accompanied Mrs. Mayhew and this reviewer on their recent visit. However, a journey to the Steel City is certainly worthwhile when the performances of the cast of seven in the current production of ‘A Doll’s House’ are as riveting and committed in conveying the action of this controversial 1879 play, a piece concerned with betrayal, secrecy, avarice and gender, whilst also serving as undeniably acerbic commentary on the patriarchal Victorian society of the day. Ibsen’s piece was, in fact, met with such outcry upon its release that he felt compelled to draft an alternative ending several years later, to appease audiences appalled to witness a mother resolving to leave her home, husband and three children as the action closes. Scroll forward 145 years and today’s audiences would be equally appalled were Nora to resolve to remain in the claustrophobic, stultifying and confining doll’s house she inhabits, such is the treatment she receives by both her husband and society at large. A modern audience would also, perhaps, be relieved to know that Ibsen reinstated his original ending - which sees Nora’s liberation – ignoring those angry voices raised in protest.
The staging of the action was both clever and subtle, beginning with drawing room piano-playing in the apparently comfortable and serene Helmer family home around Christmas-time, with the plot’s surface events telling of good prospects ahead for newly-promoted bank manager Torvald and his “skylark”, Nora, the wife he purports to adore. An audience might then wonder how, with frightening speed, we come to hear this same character proclaim, as the final episodes of the action unfold that, “From now on, forget happiness. Now it’s just about saving the remains, the wreckage, the appearance” as a superficially harmonious world implodes. Nothing, ultimately, can be salvaged … the centrepiece piano is literally pushed into the corner and forgotten; the symbol of a homely family Christmas, the shimmering tree festooned with baubles and candles, never actually graces the Helmer’s drawing room; and the children’s beaming, excited Christmas faces are never seen onstage in this production. They, like Nora, are rendered voiceless and invisible.
Quite deliberately, Nora, always under the gaze of both public and private scrutiny, never left the onstage action, seemingly trapped within her own home. As Year 13 well know, inaccessible doorways are a key element in Ibsen’s staging and we felt glaring eyes were perpetually upon the protagonist: those of the insidious Krogstad, as he came calling with blackmail in mind; questioning Christine’s, her estranged friend from the past; and those of
forlorn family friend, Dr. Rank, a man full of both love and desperation in equal measure. The frenzied rhythms of Nora’s tarantella dance, which so thrilled Torvald at the Christmas Day party held in the apartment upstairs, actually heralded his wife’s first steps away from both his home and control. Act Three culminated with a lengthy, measured and heartfelt exchange between two characters from quite literally opposite sides of the acting area – physical action was superfluous, as Ibsen’s words conveyed all we needed to know. It might as well have been two people inhabiting different worlds, as they simply had nothing left between them which was meaningful, Torvald unable to see it was he who had, over the eight years of their marriage, controlled, moulded and shaped his wife into someone she simply did not wish to be. A plaything no longer, finally unafraid to remove herself from those hallways and closed doors of the cage which had entrapped her for so long, Torvald’s “silly girl”, Nora breaks free, choosing her own destiny via, at this production’s close, her own physical pathway from the doll’s house she leaves behind.
So, a blow struck in the battle for gender equality? A patriarchal world exposed? Hmm. This compelling production chose, instead, to end with a Torvald still espousing the same language with which he began, an unenlightened man unchanged and unbending, even after his “songbird” had escaped into a world beyond his reach.