Written in 1879, Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” confronts institutions — marriage, family — that are as stifling and oppressive now as they were more than a century ago. This makes the social drama, which will begin a three-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on February 22, all the more relevant to contemporary audiences. Director Carrie Cracknell and playwright Simon Stephens handle the production, which enjoyed a celebrated run at the Young Vic in London’s West End, delicately and without massive shakeups to the original text. If you’re familiar with the play, you’ll know it doesn’t need it. Hattie Morahan revives the role of Nora, the housewife at the center Ibsen’s masterwork whose marriage, as the theater critic John Simon once called it, is “a collaboration of illusions.”
The production is given a cinematic staging via a revolving stage that, like the recent production of “Machinal” on Broadway, doesn’t appear gimmicky or unnecessary. As the stage spins, our understanding of the connections between all the people connected to Nora — her family, her employees — is made clear, their dismantling more severe. The stage, like the narrative, spins out of control.
In a recent conversation with ARTINFO, Cracknell spoke about her “long fascination” with Ibsen, the architectural research she did with designer Ian MacNeil, and why she views Nora as more complicated than a simple feminist reading provides.
What is the appeal of “A Doll’s House” for a contemporary audience?
I’ve had quite a long held fascination with Ibsen. I love the way he depicts the best and the worst parts of people, and creates these characters which are compellingly complicated and difficult. What was fascinating as I started to work on “A Doll’s House” was to try to find a relationship between the play and the world of gender politics now. So I started on the process with Simon Stephens, when he was working on the revision, of trying to understand exactly what things had changed but of course which things remained — or how the relationship between women and men now differs from the relationship between women and men then.
Can you talk a little more about your work with Simon Stephens? How has the text changed?
The intention of Simon and I, when we were working on the new version, was to really respect the original and not to try to make a radically departing version, but to release the original play for a contemporary audience. The way Simon approached that was to cut some of the slightly more over-expressed text in the translation, so that it felt more psychologically attuned to the way people speak now. We were also interested in uncovering certain elements of the play — for example, the relationship between Nora and the children, and the sexual dynamics between Nora and Torvald, which in its day was slightly more guarded in the way it was written. Simon made that more expressed and visceral in his version. But we also imagined our version like revealing layers of dirt from an old painting, nothing any more radical than that — trying to find the polish and shine of the original play.
When approaching a play with such a history are you looking back to its history on the stage, what others have done before?
I try to do as much historical research as possible. I went on a field trip with Ian MacNeil, the designer, to Norway, and we went to look at Ibsen’s apartment and went to an extraordinary folk art museum outside of Oslo where they recreated an apartment from the time the play was written. We really looked a lot at the architecture of the time and got really excited by these very heavily built European apartments, which actually reminded us of New York tenements, which served as the model from the world of the play. We all have an idea of what a doll’s house looks like, but what’s clear from the play is that they live in a flat and are aspirationally middle-class and probably hoping to move into their own flat, with their own garden. That became a central part of the design process — trying to blend that feeling of an apartment, use that as the basis of the production, but from that to move into something more expressive. So we took the flat and revolved it so characters can walk in and out of all the different rooms and the audience can have a panoramic perspective. Again, it wasn’t about radically breaking from the play, but what we connected to emotionally, what were the themes that were most potent to us, and how do we release those themes.
Is there room for multiple interpretations of the characters within the creative process?
I think when you’re working on a version you have to commit the writer of the new version to be authorial. So, we had lots of conversations about the characters, but ultimately Simon, as the primary artist in that process, found his own connections. Then, when I would read each draft, I would feedback and say, perhaps we need to draw out this quality, or I don’t understand or believe the psychology in that moment. But it was important to me for Simon to find his own roots through those characters.
The easy read of Nora in “A Doll’s House” — and why people feel she is a contemporary character — is that she’s a proto-feminist. I know Ibsen rejected that reading, but how do you view her? Is Nora a feminist hero?
I think it’s more complicated than that. The play has rightly been cast as a feminist play because it’s the first time we really staged a woman breaking out of the destructive confines of marriage. But I also appreciate the fact that Ibsen felt the play was more than that, and that he was trying to express something bigger or deeper about the individual within societal structures. It just so happens that heroine was a woman, and a woman breaking out of those structures. I also feel that it’s important that the final door slam [which occurs at the end of the play] isn’t a moment of triumph, not a moment of catharsis. It has to be the beginning of an unraveling of a life lived — of the lives of the three small children, of the lives of the staff, of the life of Torvald, and the life of Nora. They all have to wake up the next morning and work out who they are in this new perspective, and Nora has to head off into an uninhabitable world and find out who she is. So on one level she’s a feminist heroine, but the play is also darker and murkier and more complicated than a sort of triumphant finale.
