Modern Drama: Realism, Stage Directions and the Ending of Ibsen's "A Doll's House", with Canadian Plays

Hook: the sound at the end

Most plays end with a speech, a kiss, a death or a bow. A Doll's House ends with a sound: a door shutting somewhere offstage. When the play opened in Copenhagen in December 1879, audiences argued about that sound for months. Some critics called it immoral. Others said it changed theatre.

In this lesson you will read Henrik Ibsen's play as a form: a realist drama in three acts in which a comfortable living room becomes a trap, and a wife who seems like a cheerful pet becomes, in one night, a person who must leave.

Context

• Henrik Ibsen (1828 to 1906) was a Norwegian playwright. A Doll's House was first performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879.
• In the 1870s a married woman in Norway had very limited legal and financial independence. A wife generally could not borrow money without her husband's consent.
• This lesson quotes the public-domain English translation by R. Farquharson Sharp (1910). Translations differ; if your copy says something slightly different, that is why.

The play in brief

Act 1 (Christmas Eve). Nora Helmer comes home with Christmas shopping. Her husband Torvald, newly made manager of a bank, teases her with pet names. Secretly, years ago, Nora borrowed money to pay for a trip to Italy that saved Torvald's life when he was ill, and she forged her father's signature on the bond. She has been paying it back in secret. Her old friend Kristine Linde arrives looking for work. Krogstad, the man who lent Nora the money and a bank employee Torvald plans to fire, threatens to reveal the forgery unless Nora saves his job.

Act 2 (Christmas Day). Nora pleads for Krogstad, but Torvald fires him. Krogstad puts a letter revealing everything into the Helmers' locked letterbox. Nora begs Torvald to help her practise the wild tarantella dance for a costume party, to keep him from the letterbox. She waits for the wonderful thing: she believes that when he knows, Torvald will take the blame himself.

Act 3 (the next night, during and after the costume party). Kristine, who once loved Krogstad, persuades him to change course. But Torvald reads the letter. He is furious, calls Nora a liar and a criminal, and says she has ruined his happiness and his reputation. Then a second letter arrives: Krogstad returns the bond. Torvald, relieved, says he forgives her. Nora sees that the wonderful thing never happened. She sits him down for a serious talk, the first, she says, in eight years of marriage, and decides to leave.

Reading stage directions as text

In a realist play, stage directions are not decoration. Ibsen's first direction describes A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly. That one sentence tells us about the Helmers' class and values: careful, respectable, concerned with appearances.

Watch how props and movement speak:

• Early in Act 1, Nora takes a packet of macaroons from her pocket and eats one or two, then checks her husband's door. A tiny secret: a forbidden treat. The prop introduces the big secret (the loan) in miniature.
• The letterbox is a prop that holds the plot: everyone on stage knows the letter is in there.
• The tarantella, danced wildly, is movement that expresses Nora's panic without words.
• In Act 3, Nora changes out of her costume into everyday clothes before the final conversation: the costume of the doll comes off.
• The final direction in Sharp's translation: The sound of a door shutting is heard from below. The most important event of the play happens offstage, and we only hear it.

The final scene

When Torvald says Nora is before all else a wife and a mother, she replies that she no longer believes it. In Sharp's translation:

I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or, at all events, that I must try and become one.

She tells him he has never loved her, only thought it pleasant to be in love with her, and that she has been his doll-wife, just as she was her father's doll-child. She leaves her keys and her ring, and walks out. Torvald is left alone, repeating Nora's phrase the most wonderful thing of all, which now means a real marriage between equals.

The ending Ibsen was pushed to change

For the play's first German production (1880), the leading actress refused to play a mother who abandons her children. Ibsen, to stop someone else rewriting it, wrote an alternative ending himself: Torvald leads Nora to the door of the children's room, and she collapses and stays. Ibsen later called this version a barbaric outrage against the play. The original ending is the one performed today.

Canadian and Indigenous drama to compare

These plays are under copyright, so they are described here:

• Tomson Highway (Cree, born in northern Manitoba), The Rez Sisters (1986): seven women from a fictional reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario set out for the biggest bingo in the world in Toronto, each with her own dream; the Cree trickster Nanabush appears in different forms. Like A Doll's House, it centres women's hopes and frustrations, but it mixes realism with comedy, myth and spiritual presence.
• Michel Tremblay, Les Belles-sœurs (1968): a Montreal working-class woman wins a million trading stamps and invites her female relatives and neighbours to help paste them into booklets. Written in joual, the everyday French of working-class Montreal, it was a landmark in Québec theatre.

Comparison question: Ibsen's realism uses one middle-class room and one woman's choice. Highway and Tremblay use groups of women and different traditions (Cree storytelling, Québécois speech) to explore women's lives. How does a group change what a play can say?