My Early 19th Century Play

My early 19th century theatre play pick was A Doll’s House written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen ( 1828 – 1906 ), dramatized the life of the writer Laura Petersen Kieler . Kieler forged documents to save her sick husband, but he demanded a legal separation, took custody of the children, and had her committed to an asylum. In the play, Ibsen's heroine, Nora , leaves her husband and children, goes in search of an education, and embodies the struggle for subjective freedom associated with the First Wave of the European women's movement.



The shock when Nora slammed shut her doll's house door reverberated throughout Europe and around the world. After the first production in Copenhagen in 1879 , Ibsen agreed to write an alternative ending for Germany: Nora's husband forces her to look at their sleeping children, and she stays. Although bowdlerized versions with happy endings appeared in America (The Child Wife, 1882 ) and Britain (The Breaking of a Butterfly, 1884 ), the original ending was championed by activists including the Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai , the American anarch‐communist Emma Goldman , and the British Socialist Eleanor Marx .

A Doll's House became the most performed play on the planet in the first half of the twentieth century as women dealt with the global changes associated with modernity. In 1911 , in the same month that the play opened in Tokyo, the feminist magazine Seito (Bluestocking) appeared and was derisively nicknamed in the popular media a nursery school for the education of Japanese Noras; in 1924 , Beijing warlords banned the play for undermining the moral integrity of China. A 1940s Argentine film version, framed as flashback, ends with an emancipated Nora returning home (directed by Ernesto Arancibia , 1943 ); a 1990s film version from the Islamic Republic of Iran has Sara/Nora leaving her husband and defying custody laws by taking her daughter (directed by Dariush Mehrjui , 1994 ). In the latest Berlin Schaubühne production, Nora shoots her husband, and he dies floating in a giant aquarium (directed by Thomas Ostermeier , 2003 ). Nora's fate has provoked rewritings, critical speculations, and dramatic sequels for more than a century. The most fantastical, written by Tanaka Chigaku in 1924 , has Nora training as a pilot in Paris, promoting world peace by flying from Italy to East Asia, and reuniting with her pacifist husband.

Extraordinary women have acted Nora; they have challenged the arts industry as directors and producers and have rocked society as political rebels. From 1889 to 1891 the English Ibsenite actress‐manager Janet Achurch promoted and performed the play throughout Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1907 / 1908 , two celebrated Russians played Nora in New York: Vera Kommisarzhevsky, the originator of the Moscow symbolist theater, and Alla Nazimova, the flamboyant bisexual Hollywood star who in 1921 made one of the seven silent film versions of the play. Fifty years later, Hollywood cast Jane Fonda as Nora, no doubt because of her infamy as Hanoi Jane, the anti–Vietnam War activist (directed by Joseph Losey , 1973 ). The actor and director Mai Zetterling and the actor and UNICEF ambassador Liv Ullman were both famous Noras, but the most notorious of all was Jiang Qing (Lan Ping), the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong and member of the Gang of Four, who played the role in 1935 —a year known in Shanghai theater as the “Year of Nora.”

http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?entry=t248.e258&srn=3&ssid=1100691863#FIRSTHIT

http://thefiendish.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ibsen-dolls-house.jpg