A Doll's House

• 1. Introduction

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  A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen's three-act play, opened at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on the 21st of December 1879, and before the year was out it had already set off what contemporaries called a "storm of outraged controversy" that leapt from the theatre into the pages of newspapers and the drawing rooms of society. The play concerns a woman named Nora Helmer, a wife and mother of three living out the ideal of the 19th-century domestic sphere, quietly carrying a secret that could destroy her family. She had borrowed money illegally to save her husband's life, forged her father's signature to do it, and spent years repaying the debt in silence. No one knew. And then someone found out. What happens next does not end the way audiences of 1879 expected. By the time the curtain fell on that December premiere, with Betty Hennings in the role of Nora and the door of the Helmer household slamming shut, the play had posed a question that would echo for generations: what does a woman owe to herself when everything around her has treated her as a plaything? The play's manuscript, in Ibsen's own hand, now sits on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. And in 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the most-performed play on earth.

• 2. The Woman Behind Nora

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  Laura Kieler, born Laura Smith Petersen, was a close friend of Ibsen's before she became the unwitting source of his most celebrated character. Her story tracked Nora's with unsettling precision. She signed an illegal loan to find a cure for her husband Victor's tuberculosis, just as Nora borrows money for Torvald's rest cure in Italy. When the debt became a problem, Laura wrote to Ibsen asking him to recommend her work to his publisher, hoping book sales would cover what she owed. He refused. She then forged a cheque. When Victor discovered what she had done, he did not protect her. He divorced her and had her committed to an asylum. Ibsen wrote A Doll's House while Laura was still inside that institution. The fate of this friend shook him deeply, in part because she had asked him personally to intervene at a critical moment, and he had not felt able or willing to do so. In the play, Ibsen gave Nora the outcome Laura never received: she walks out with her head held high. Laura eventually returned to her husband and children at his urging, went on to have a successful writing career, and lived to the age of 83. She spent years afterward discontented with being known solely as "Ibsen's Nora."

• 3. How the Play Took Shape

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  Ibsen began thinking about A Doll's House around May 1878, though he did not write a single line of the first draft until a year later. During that intervening period he turned the problem over in his mind, and at some point he visualized his protagonist approaching him in "a blue woolen dress." On the 19th of October 1878, in Rome, he set down a note that framed the work as a "modern tragedy." The note argued that a woman cannot be herself in modern society because it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint!" On the 15th of September 1879 he sent the completed fair copy to his publisher. It appeared in Copenhagen on the 4th of December 1879, in a first edition of 8,000 copies. That edition sold out within a month. A second edition of 3,000 followed on the 4th of January 1880, and a third of 2,500 was issued on the 8th of March. The critic Erik Bøgh, writing for the Norwegian paper Folkets Avis after the premiere, admired the play's restraint: "Not a single declamatory phrase, no high dramatics, no drop of blood, not even a tear." Every performance of the premiere run sold out.

• 4. The Alternative Ending

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  In Germany, the actress Hedwig Raabe refused to perform the play as written. "I would never leave my children!" she declared. Because copyright law of the time could not protect Ibsen's original text, he faced a real risk that a lesser dramatist would rewrite the ending without his input. To prevent that, he did something he later described as self-inflicted damage: he wrote an alternative ending himself. In his version for Germany, Nora is led to her sleeping children after the argument with Torvald. Seeing them, she collapses, and the curtain falls with the implication that she stays. Ibsen called this ending a "barbaric outrage" on his own play. A production of this version opened in Flensburg in February 1880 and ran also in Hamburg, Dresden, Hanover, and Berlin. Even there it failed to hold: protests mounted, the production lost momentum, and Raabe eventually restored the original ending. Virtually all productions since that period have used the ending Ibsen wrote first, and so do nearly all the film adaptations. The Space Arts Centre in London mounted one notable exception in June 2015, staging a version that deliberately used the discarded alternate ending.

• 5. Reception and Controversy

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  To many 19th-century Europeans, the covenant of marriage was considered holy, and Ibsen's portrayal of it was scandalous. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was an outlier: he found Ibsen's willingness to examine society without prejudice exhilarating, and he joined Eleanor Marx in staging a private production in London in 1886, taking on the role of Krogstad himself while Marx played Nora. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg took the opposite view, criticizing the play in his 1884 collection Getting Married. Strindberg questioned why Nora would leave her children with a man she so deeply disapproved of, and argued that her own illegal forgery and deception should complicate any reading of her as the play's moral center. Shaw's own assessment of Nora's exit was that she left to begin "a journey in search of self-respect and apprenticeship to life" and that her revolt marked "the end of a chapter of human history." Michael Meyer disagreed with feminist readings altogether, arguing that the play's real theme is not women's rights but the need of every individual to find out who they really are. Ibsen himself, in a speech to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898, insisted he had written "without any conscious thought of making propaganda," describing his task as "the description of humanity." Yet the scholar Miriam Schneir included the play in her anthology Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, calling it one of the essential feminist works. James Huneker, writing in Iconoclasts in 1905, said of Nora's final exit: "That slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world."

• 6. A Century of Adaptations

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  The play reached London first through a heavily reworked adaptation by Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman called Breaking a Butterfly, staged at the Princess Theatre on the 3rd of March 1884. In that version, as H. L. Mencken later summarized, a faithful old clerk steals the promissory note from Krogstad's desk and the curtain falls upon a happy home. The first public British production of the original opened on the 7th of June 1889 at the Novelty Theatre, with Janet Achurch as Nora. Achurch brought the play to Australia that same year. The United States saw it first in 1883 in Louisville, Kentucky, with Helena Modjeska in the role. Its Broadway premiere followed on the 21st of December 1889 at the Palmer's Theatre. In Germany, the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a television adaptation in 1974, with Margit Carstensen in the title role. The 1992 Iranian film Sara, directed by Dariush Mehrjui and starring Niki Karimi, transferred the story to Iran. In 2017, playwright Lucas Hnath wrote A Doll's House, Part 2, a follow-up imagining Nora's return. The Jamie Lloyd Company's 2023 Broadway production, starring Jessica Chastain at the Hudson Theatre, opened on the 9th of March and ran until the 10th of June. In 2019, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow staged Stef Smith's radical reworking Nora: A Doll's House, in which three actors play Nora simultaneously across the years 1918, 1968, and 2018.