A Doll's House E-Book

Henrik Ibsen

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 122

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. A Doll's House is Ibsen's revolutionary tale of Nora's awakening to her need for a life of her own. Translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

A DOLL’S HOUSE

by Henrik Ibsen

edited and with an introduction by Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS Londonwww.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Ibsen: Key Dates

A Doll's House

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828-1904)

When Ibsen was 23, he was appointed writer-in-residence at the newly-established Norwegian National Theatre in Bergen. Six years later he was made Director of the Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania (now Oslo), a post he held until 1862.

Ibsen found his years in the theatre intensely frustrating. The towns were small and the audiences parochial and frivolous-minded. His own plays at the time were chiefly historical dramas, some in verse, modelled on Shakespeare, Schiller and Hugo. In the end the Norwegian Theatre lost its audience, ran out of money, and, in 1864, after two years of poverty (aggravated by alcoholism and depression), Ibsen left Norway for Italy and Germany, countries in which he spent the next 27 years.

The first two plays Ibsen wrote in self-imposed exile, the verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), established his reputation. With characteristic iron will, however, he immediately changed his style. He dropped verse for prose (which was more suitable, he said, for ‘serious subjects’), and, from 1877 onwards, wrote no more plays on historical or folk-inspired subjects. His subsequent plays (a dozen from The Pillars of Society, 1879, to When We Dead Awaken, 1899) all dealt with contemporary social or philosophical issues, and were set among the provincial bourgeoisie. They regularly caused scandal and took time to find favour with critics and the middle-class audiences whose lives and concerns they dramatised. Other critics (notably Archer and Shaw in Britain) rallied to his cause, and by his sixties (the time of his greatest plays), he had become the grand old man not only of Scandinavian literature but of European theatre in general; the ‘problem play’ of which he was a pioneer has been a staple theatre genre ever since.

Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891. He wrote four more plays, but in 1901 suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes, the last of which proved fatal.

A Doll’s House: What Happens in the Play

The action takes place in the apartment of Nora and Torvald Helmer. It begins on Christmas Eve, as Nora comes home from shopping in time to decorate the tree. She and Helmer reveal their relationship in a bantering dialogue: he is possessive and treats her like a pet or a ‘dolly-baby’, she responds in kind. Her old schoolfriend Mrs Linde arrives, and asks Nora to beg Helmer (who has just been appointed Bank Manager) to find her a job. She, too, treats Nora as an empty-headed spendthrift, until Nora reveals that years ago, to save Helmer’s life, she secretly found money to pay for a holiday in Italy. We meet Dr Rank, the Helmers’ friend and regular visitor – and then we are introduced to Krogstad, from whom Nora borrowed the holiday-money. It transpires that she forged a signature to do so – and Krogstad, whom Helmer has just dismissed from the Bank, says that he will make trouble. Alone with Helmer, Nora tries to persuade him to reinstate Krogstad, but Helmer angrily refuses, saying that the man’s ‘crime’, forging a document, makes him feel physically ill.

Act Two takes place on Christmas Day. Nora and Mrs Linde are repairing a fancy-dress which Nora is to wear at a party the following evening. Nora is on tenterhooks for the post to arrive, bringing Krogstad’s letter telling Helmer the whole business of the loan. Once again Nora tries to persuade Helmer to reinstate Krogstad, without success. She nerves herself (at Mrs Linde’s suggestion) to borrow money from Rank, but recoils in horror when Rank responds by declaring his long-felt love for her. Krogstad now arrives, saying that he will reveal everything unless Helmer gives him not just his old job, but a higher position. Nora answers that she will commit suicide, and Krogstad says that it will make no difference, and goes to write his letter. In despair, Nora frantically dances and sings, ostensibly practising her tarantella for the next day’s party. Rank plays the piano; Helmer watches her hysteria in amazement.

Act Three takes place on the evening of Boxing Day. The Helmers are at the party, and Mrs Linde is waiting for them to come home. Krogstad arrives, and he and Mrs Linde rekindle a long-forgotten love and decide to make a new start in life, together. Krogstad goes, as Helmer and Nora return. Helmer is tipsy, but none the less Mrs Linde urges Nora to tell him everything: that is the only way they can discover the truth of their relationship. She goes, but before Nora can speak Helmer makes a clumsy, drunken pass at her. Rank now arrives, also tipsy, and announces that he is terminally ill. Helmer finds Krogstad’s letter in the box behind the door, and rails at Nora for betraying his trust, being a bad mother and destroying their family life. A second letter arrives in the box – Krogstad has recanted, and returned the forged document. Helmer apologises to Nora and says that all is forgiven. To his astonishment she answers that she now sees the truth at last, about herself and about their relationship. She is not his doll, but a person in her own right, and she is leaving him to find out more of the truth about herself. Distraught, he tries to understand, tries to persuade her to stay ‘on new terms’ – but she has travelled too far to make such a compromise and leaves. Alone, he faces the thought that if he, too, changes, the ‘miracle’ may happen, and at this precise moment we hear a door slam offstage and the curtain falls.

The ‘Problem’ Play and the ‘Well-Made’ Play

The ‘problem’ play was a response, in mid-19th-century European theatre, to an upsurge in public discussion of ‘big’ social and philosophical issues. Favoured topics were the differing natures and social roles of women and men, family relationships, sexual behaviour, religion, politics and social ethics. The plays were set among ordinary, contemporary people, whose dilemmas onstage embodied the question under discussion. The ‘problem’ plays of some writers – for example Bjørnson in Norway, Sardou in France and Henry Arthur Jones in Britain – were often creaking and contrived: sermons or newspaper leaders disguised as art. (Shaw coined the nickname ‘Sardoodledum’; Wilde memorably said, ‘There are three rules for the young playwright. The first rule is not to write like Jones. The second and third rules are the same.’) But in other hands, notably Ibsen’s, concentration on character and on personal tragedy elevated the form: even such preachy plays as Ghosts or An Enemy of the People make their impact through the vitality of their characters and situations rather than the underlying issues they address.

Rules for the ‘well-made’ play were formulated in France in the early nineteenth century, and quickly spread throughout Europe. They were as strict as those Aristotle laid down for ancient tragedy. In a ‘well-made’ play, action should be organised in three sections: exposition of the central problem, alarms and excursions, dénouement. The plot should hinge on a secret or a dilemma which affects the main character; the audience is allowed only hints and glimpses of this as the play proceeds, and all is fully revealed only as the action moves towards dénouement. There should be reversal of fortune – ‘up’ in a ‘well-made’ farce, ‘down’ in a ‘well-made’ melodrama. And finally, settings, dialogue and behaviour should be contemporary and conventional. Tens of thousands of ‘well-made’ plays were written, and most are justly forgotten. (Victorian melodramas are typical examples.) But in the hands of fine writers – Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias and Labiche’s farces spring to mind, not to mention Rattigan’s plays in a later age – the recipe has led to masterpieces. ‘Well-made’ conventions, in whole or in part, were particularly useful to writers of ‘problem plays’, whose effect on their audience depended, in part, on putting a spin on familiar-seeming characters and situations and on received ideas.

A Doll’s House

Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, much of it in a holiday apartment in Amalfi; it was first published, and first performed, in December that year. From the start it attracted critical praise, and – rather more unexpectedly, perhaps, in view of the bourgeois nature of its audiences – full houses. Critics applauded its technical innovation, the way it gave tragedy a domestic setting, with no more than five main characters and an almost total absence of histrionics. It is impossible to say what drew audiences, though the fact that the ‘message’ of the play was much discussed, as if Ibsen had preached some kind of sermon about contemporary life, suggests that this may have been at least part of what attracted people to the theatre or made them buy the printed text (a best-seller). Possibly also the racking-up of emotional tension, which is such a feature of the action, made its impression, so that word-of-mouth soon guaranteed the play-going public a cathartic, if uncomfortable, night out.

The play was quickly taken up in Germany; it was performed in New York in 1882 and in London in 1884 – the first of Ibsen’s plays to reach the US and UK, in each case initially in an adapted and somewhat emasculated form; by the mid-1890s it was part of the international repertoire, a main cause of Ibsen’s worldwide reputation. The first English Helmer was Herbert Beerbohm Tree; distinguished UK Noras have included Janet Achurch, Gwen Ffrangçon-Davies, Sybil Thorndike, Flora Robson and Claire Bloom (who filmed it in 1973 with Anthony Hopkins as Helmer and Ralph Richardson as Rank); distinguished US Noras have included Beatrice Cameron (whose production caused nationwide controversy in the late 1880s), Ruth Gordon (in an adaptation by Thornton Wilder) and Jane Fonda (in a 1973 film notable for its feminist distortion of the play’s message).

Right from the start, A Doll’s House has been the prey of people who saw in it confirmation of their own prejudices about society. Calvinists in Ibsen’s own country, and fundamentalist Christians of other kinds in the US, railed against its ‘denunciation of marriage’; women’s guilds were disgusted by its ‘laxity of language’, and by its depiction onstage of drunkenness, domestic wrangling and an extortioner with – horror of horrors – redeeming characteristics. The play’s supporters could be equally dogmatic. In particular, from Shaw onwards (in The Quintessence of Ibsenism) it has regularly been claimed as a major document of women’s emancipation, a trumpet-call to blow down the walls of Western, male oppression. It is still regularly overlaid with feminist interpretations, in both academic books and stage productions. Ibsen’s theme is emancipation, but his play is, so to speak, as much peoplist as feminist. He is concerned that everyone, of either gender, should break free of conventional shackles and discover his or her own moral identity; however painful or destructive this process proves to be, Ibsen’s claim is that moral truth is always better than moral lie. Nora in the play may be the most spectacular adventurer along the path to self-knowledge, but she is by no means the only one. As the action develops, all the other main characters approach a similar point of discovery in different ways and from different directions, and make their own decisions about how that discovery will affect their future actions. (Only Helmer’s future action is left undecided; as the curtain falls he is at the very moment of self-discovery.)

Assertion of moral identity involves not rejection of the way other people treat us, or we them, but an examination of where we stand in relation to ourselves and others; the results of that examination may be revolt against the status quo, or acceptance, but the important thing, for Ibsen and his characters, is not the action which follows the examination but the moral purgation which precedes it. In 1880 the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, about to play Nora in the German première, refused to perform the original ending on the grounds that she herself, as a mother, would never desert her children as Nora deserted hers. Ibsen, unwillingly, wrote an alternative ending (in which Helmer persuades Nora to ‘think again of the little ones’, and leads her to the children’s door, where she collapses as the curtain falls). This subverts the entire point of the play, restores the status quo and destroys Nora’s moral character – something Ibsen acknowledged by describing it as a ‘barbaric outrage’ on the play, and which the actress admitted by dropping the ending as soon she could, in favour of the original.

Characterisation and Irony

The role of Nora is one of the most challenging and rewarding in all Ibsen’s work. In the first two acts she barely leaves the stage, and runs the gamut from simpering flirtation (ironically underscored by our knowledge that she is deliberately playing the part of a child-wife) to energetic hysteria. As the third act opens (after her strenuous dancing which ends Act Two) the actress has a respite offstage, before coming on to experience a seduction, a domestic quarrel and the total change of direction which has been implicit from the start but which now carries the action to its bleak conclusion. The volatility of the part is brilliantly offset by Helmer’s rocklike steadiness: his and Nora’s relationship is like a darkly tragic version of the vaudeville double act in which an anarchic, unpredictable comedian bounces off the ‘straight man’, whose assumption of control is constantly challenged but never abandoned. Ibsen trumps this by the ending: Helmer’s collapse, in terms of what he is, is a moment of moral self-discovery as huge, and as open-ended, as anything which happens to Nora in the play.

In 19th-century Scandinavian theatre-companies of the traditional kind, there were five main performers. They took the roles, respectively, of Hero, Heroine, Confidante, Villain and ‘Fifth Business’. ‘Fifth Business’ brought about the dénouement of the action: either the hero’s or heroine’s recognition that he/she was careering to self-inflicted doom, or the revelation or incident which brought destruction or salvation from outside the characters. (If coincidence brought happiness at the end of a melodrama, that coincidence was manipulated by ‘Fifth Business’.) In A Doll’s House