adaption

ADDRESSING THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON

OF A DOLL’S HOUSE: AN INTERCULTURAL

INTERVENTION

Julie Holledge

NORA rivals Antigone, Medea, and Juliet, as the most performed, discussed, and debated female character on the international stage. The extraordinary diversity of audiences across historical time and geographical space who have responded to A Doll’s House can be illustrated by the following performances randomly chosen from the hundreds of productions presented over the past 126 years. In 1891, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the first performance of the play coincided with an agricultural show; it was so popular that the auditorium overflowed and an extra 200 or 300 people were crammed onto the stage to watch the drama.1 Forty-five years later, in 1934, the play provoked such a stir in the audience in Seoul that, according to Korean critic Na Woong, ‘At Nora’s last dialogue, rolling applause broke out from the ladies’ seats, and the sound ‘‘hush, hush’’ rose among the gentlemen.’2 Seventy-two years later, in May 2006, the first Egyptian production of A Doll’s House was seen in Alexandria and proved so successful it was chosen to open the First National Egyptian Theatre Festival.3

As a scholar of intercultural performance, I am fascinated by this ‘Doll’s House’ phenomenon. How can we account for the play’s extraordinary success? As this question is impossible to answer in a short paper, the following remarks should be read as my initial thoughts on a methodology for conducting a full-length study of this global theatrical conundrum.

A premise commonly used to explain global success in art works has been articulated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith: ‘At a given time and under the contemporary conditions of available materials, technology, and techniques, a particular object – let us say a verbal artefact or text – may perform certain desired/able functions quite well for some set of subjects. It will do so by virtue of certain of its ‘‘properties’’.’4

# 2008 TAYLOR & FRANCIS [ 13 ] DOI 10.1080/15021860802133777

There are three ‘properties’ frequently cited as responsible for the global impact of A Doll’s House on multiple ‘sets of subjects’. I will argue that while all three are significant, none is sufficiently ubiquitous in the cross-cultural production history of the play to provide a definitive answer to our question.

Aesthetic innovation

The publication of Toril Moi’s recent portrait of Ibsen as a founder of European modernism has added considerable weight to the claim that A Doll’s House represents a major innovation in theatre aesthetics.5 Her argument relies on a reevaluation of theatrical realism which places it as central, rather than oppositional, to modernist aesthetics. Certainly, the shift that Moi describes – from a popular theatre of romantic spectacle to a theatre reflecting the everyday domestic life of the bourgeoisie – represents a seismic aesthetic shift in late nineteenth-century European theatre. Her argument fits perfectly within British theatre history, in which Ibsen’s plays are tied to the introduction of psychologically realist characters.6 While the growth in the psychological complexity of British male characters dates from Tom Robertson’s domestic dramas of the 1860s7, the representation of female characters, before the arrival in London of Nora and Hedda8, was still dependent on displays of primary emotions associated with melodrama. A parody of these performance conventions can be found in ‘A Doll’s House Repaired’, written by Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill in 1891.9 In this satiric rewriting of Ibsen’s play, the curtain falls as Nora ‘overwhelmed, sinks on her knees…..sobbing in uncontrollable violence’ while pleading for access to her children.10

While Nora is central to the transition of female characters from melodrama to psychological realism in British theatre, any argument that attributes the global success of the play to the aesthetics of realism falters even within Europe. One of the most critically acclaimed of the early Noras, Vera Kommissarzhevskaya, was the originator of the Moscow symbolist theatre. As one of her contemporaries observed: ‘She opened wide the window to another world by intonation alone…… that immersed the spectator in mysticism and transformed her, inadvertently and unconsciously,

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into a symbol’.11 Her brother, Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky, designed an abstraction of a doll’s house out of folded brown curtains, hanging at acute angles, for her performance as Nora.12

If some European productions of A Doll’s House had shifted from realism to symbolism by the beginning of the twentieth century, what happened when the play was produced outside this geographical and temporal location? What meaning does an aesthetic innovation have when it is removed from its historical roots? At this point we must take a conjectural leap and question whether a text that is designed as realism in one culture can be consumed as realism in another.

In Japan in 1911, it is clear from the critical response, that the Tokyo audience at the premier of A Doll’s House felt they were watching a strange performance convention; and it was not just the audience that experienced a disorientation. According to the first Japanese Nora, Matsui Sumako, performing in European costumes was a novelty: ‘When Helmer returns home from the dance, he slings the coat over a chair and because both sides are black it is difficult for him to distinguish between the collar and the hem and he often gets into a muddle.’13 This difficulty with western clothing suggests that the neither the actors, nor their audiences, were sufficiently familiar with European plays to distinguish realism from other foreign theatrical genres. Not only does this Japanese perfor- mance raise doubts about cross-cultural recognition of aesthetic innovation, it also poses questions regarding audience interpreta- tions of characters marked as culturally other. This brings me to the second ‘property’ that is frequently cited as fundamental to the international success of A Doll’s House.

The iconic status of Nora as a symbol of women’s struggle for subjective freedom

In Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the middle-class women who were agitating for financial independence, the vote, equality before the law, access to education, and a place in the work force adopted Nora as an icon of women’s emancipation. She seems to have embodied Jurgen Habermas’ definition of subjective freedom: ‘the space secured by civil law for the rational pursuit of

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one’s own interests: in the state, as the in-principle equal rights to participation in the formation of political will; in the private sphere, as ethical autonomy and self-realisation.’14

But how much does this tell us? How fixed is this notion of subjective freedom, particularly when it comes to ‘ethical autonomy and self-realisation’? The famous women activists who cited Nora in their polemical writing would have been hard pressed to agree on a common vision of women’s self-realisation: they included Olive Schreiner, the South African liberal feminist and pacifist; Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian Bolshevik; Emma Goldman, the American anarcho-communist; and Eleanor Marx, the British socialist.15

When we move away from Europe and North America, self- realisation becomes an even more slippery concept, as is demonstrated by the constantly changing face of Nora in China.16

In Beijing, Nora was banned from the drama clubs in the twenties because of her ‘immoral’ influence, but in the fifties the Beijing critics found Nora passé.17 In Shanghai, it was the actress/school teacher, Wang Ping, that was banned18; yet in the same year the starlet Lan Ping, (alias Jiang Quin) made the character an ‘extreme rebel’, and ushered in Shanghai’s Year of Nora 19. With so many interpretive variations on Nora in China, let alone the rest of the world, it is impossible to limit the discourse embodied within the character to the particularities of the late nineteenth-century European movement for women’s emancipation. This is not to deny a causal relationship between local gender politics and the interpretive leaps made by diverse actors, directors, adaptors and producers, but merely to stress that gender relations are lived realities tied to specific times and places. And it is not just gender relations that are culturally specific; the emotional responses of audiences to interpretive strategies, as embodied in characters, are equally tied to cultural particularities. This brings me to the heart of the third ‘property’ I want to examine.

The empathetic connection between the audience and the character of Nora

Remarkable women have played Nora, many of them claiming a strong identification with the character; and throughout the

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production history of the play there have been first person accounts of audience members who have shared this empathetic connec- tion.20 But there is evidence to suggest that the success of the play is not dependent on this emotional interaction. Let us return to the first Japanese production of A Doll’s House, and consider whether it was possible for the character of Nora to work empathetically with an audience that had no familiarity with middle class domestic life in late nineteenth-century Europe. Matsui Sumako gives us an insight into the emotional responses of her audience: ‘Listening to people’s reactions after the performance, some expressed their dismay at what a strong and cold woman Nora had become…. I believe that the average person, even if derisive of Helmer’s response, was scathing of Nora’s actions.’21

Matsui Sumako does not imply that it was her intention to represent a ‘cold’ Nora. Her comments provide a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the production because they indicate that she did not feel an empathetic connection with the audience in the final scene of the play. Whereas this absence of empathy in a European production might have signified that the performance was a failure, the records show that the production was well received in Osaka and Tokyo. This presents us with an interesting intercultural conundrum: if the play was working despite this lack of empathy, how did the audience read the performance emotionally? This question is equally relevant to the 1935 Shanghai production,22 where the reviewers commented on the emotional intensity and the integrity of the characterisation.23 We cannot assume, just because Stanislavski’s techniques were familiar to the Shanghai actors, that the emotional intensity observed by the critics took the same form of empathy with Nora that typified emotional interactions in the playhouses of Europe.24

This brief look at snapshots from the production history of A Doll’s House demonstrates how difficult it is to identify fixed properties that are responsible for the play’s success across cultures and through time. The second strategy I want to employ to unravel this theatrical puzzle involves identifying elements in the text that have provoked interpretive innovation. These elements invite as great a diversity of cultural interpretations as the properties examined already, but instead of looking at supposedly fixed

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properties only to find that they evaporate into infinite interpreta- tions, the second strategy reverses this dynamic to examine how a variety of interpretations may reveal common preoccupations. Underlying this strategy is the assumption that anxieties and ambiguities contained in a text provoke creative engagement from artists and audiences, thus stimulating multiple productions with interpretive diversities that attract critical attention. This is not to say that these innovations are necessarily concerned with the manifestation of these anxieties, in fact the very opposite may be the case. In the examples that I will use, it appears that it is precisely because these anxieties are still present in diverse social contexts, that it has become necessary to circumvent or elide them within these interpretations.

A symptomatic reading of A Doll’s House that links the creative interest of artists to textual elements that are ambiguous or provoke social anxiety, must inevitably focus on the decision by Nora to leave her children, and the rehearsal of the tarantella.

Abandoned children

There can be no other play in the history of theatre that has provoked so many sequels, prequels, adaptations, and re-writings as A Doll’s House; and it is arguable that all of them are a consequence of Ibsen’s provocation, not that a wife can leave a husband, but that a mother can make a rational decision to leave her children. If Ibsen had written a scene in which a female character, in the grip of uncontrollable emotion, had abandoned her husband and children, he would have reinforced a nineteenth-century stereotype of irrational, hysterical and aberrant femininity. Instead, he severed the emotional and physical attachment between a mother and child by means of logical and rational thought, and thus attacked one of the cornerstones and justifications of gender division in numerous cultures: the natural and indivisible bond between a mother and her children.

Today the anxiety provoked by the abandonment of children is still with us, and the ending of the play is being adapted, altered, or completely rewritten for twenty-first century audiences. In Thomas Ostermeier’s internationally acclaimed Schaubühne am Lehniner

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Platz production,25 Nora relinquishes the power of rational argument and shoots Helmer; as he dies floating in a giant aquarium, the racially marked nanny assumes the role of surrogate mother, gathers the children in her arms, and removes them from the dysfunctional doll’s house. A subtler shift in interpretation marks the ending of Gamal Yakout’s award winning 2006 production in Egypt: Nora leaves the door open.26 Nehad Selaiha, the influential Al Ahram theatre critic, attributed this change to the director’s Mediterranean culture ‘where women invariably forgive, or overlook, the silly foibles of men and never take quite seriously what they say.’27 An alternative critique might suggest that the open door encourages the audience to ‘never take quite seriously’ what a woman says. While these German and Egyptian produc- tions reinterpret the text by means of physical action, Cheela Chilala’s 2006 Zambian adaptation, Forbidden Ground,28 ends with the following verbal exchange between Nora and Helmer/Hema:

Hema: You cannot leave the children motherless. Stay, for the sake of the children, stay! Nora: Don’t worry about the children, Hema. They are not motherless and will never be. Hema: They will be if you walk away. Nora: I will come back for them tomorrow morning. I will never abandon my children. Hema: You cannot look after them without a husband. Nora: I can, and I will.29

This Zambian Nora, like Sara in Dariush Mehrjui’s Iranian film version of A Doll’s House,30 is defying patriarchal child custody laws by taking her children. But whatever the rationale provided by the directors and actors responsible for these productions, all their interpretations silence the anxiety provoked by a mother leaving her children.

Dancing the tarantella

The disquiet induced by the final scene of the play is preceded by an earlier moment in the text that provokes anxiety by questioning the

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authenticity of all feminine behavior: the rehearsal of the tarantella. Most interpretive innovations do not tamper with the narrative function of the rehearsal, which is to stop Helmer opening Krogstad’s letter, or alter the basic metaphor of the tarantella, which equates the contents of the letter with the deadly venom of the tarantula spider that can only be assuaged by a frenetic dance. But they do influence the meaning attributed to the rehearsal by de- emphasizing Nora’s inner angst, and foregrounding Helmer’s objectification of her dancing body. The text makes it explicit that Helmer has chosen the costume and the dance for the performance at the Stenborgs’ party, and implies that he desires Nora when she dresses up as a Neapolitan fisher girl. Hence most productions justifiably interpret the tarantella as reflective of Helmer’s, and even Rank’s, sexual fantasies. In Ostermeier’s production, Anne Tismer begins her dance licking a Star Wars’ phallic light stick; in Egypt in 2006, in a review of Ali Khalifa’s National Theatre production, Nehad Selaiha, describes the film actress Poussie’s Nora as ‘luscious and seductive, bedecked in a skimpy, leopard-skin dress, with a tambourine in her hand, performing a strange gypsy dance’.31 Every tarantella is interpretively unique, and most contain culturally specific erotica intended for the male heterosexual voyeur. However, instead of focusing on this rich cross-cultural data, I am concerned in this paper with the repressed and elided aspects of the dance: the excessive elements that denote Nora’s inner crisis.

By implication in Ibsen’s text, the dance as choreographed by Helmer sits within the boundaries of aestheticised femininity; but it becomes wild and exaggerated as Nora’s hair falls on her shoulders, and Mrs Linde, Helmer, and Rank see something in the dance that disturbs them enough to stop the rehearsal. The representation of this high point in the physical text, when Nora’s subjectivity breaks through Helmer’s directorial control, is an interpretive challenge in any production. The performance difficulties embedded in this moment, which supposedly induces anxiety in Nora’s on-stage and off-stage audience, can be attributed to the tricky concept of masquerade.

In her famous analysis of a woman who compensated for her social power as an intellectual by her excessive flirtatious behavior, Joan Riviere defined masquerade as an artificial femininity used to ward off reprisals for the appropriation of male power:

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‘Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.’32 When Nora dances the tarantella, she is delaying discovery of a secret that has allowed her to experience the thrill of being ‘almost’ like a man;33 her dance can thus be described as a classic use of masquerade. Within socially prescribed boundaries, masquerade can pass as innate femininity, but exaggerated it reveals its artificiality. Undermining gender signification creates social anxiety, which may explain the interpretive diversity that surrounds this moment, and the frequent decision to excise it from the text.

Different production strategies used to avoid this climactic moment are evident in three recently released video and film adaptations: Patrick Garland’s 1973 film starring Claire Bloom, re- released in 2003;34 Dariush Mehrjui’s 1993 Iranian film adaptation, Sara, starring Niki Karimi; and the 2003 televised version of Thomas Ostermeier’s theatre production.35 In the Garland version, the climactic moment is cut from the text. Nora’s hair never falls and Mrs Linde never appears; Helmer stops Nora when she pirouettes, instructs her to resume dancing with more grace, and she obliges. The dramaturgical justification for this edit is the inclusion of Nora’s dance at the Stenborgs’ party: in this sequence the camera lingers on the exposed white stockings and laced boots of Nora’s peasant costume, thus referencing not only the ‘silk stocking’ scene but also a popular fetishisation of the performing female body in the late nineteenth century. In Mehrjui’s version, the whole scene is removed from the text and again substituted with a party, this time to celebrate Helmer/Hessam’s promotion. There can be no tarantella in the Iranian version because cinematic exhibition of the female performing body is censored. At the party it is the men who dance; a close up of Sara shows her gently swaying to the music as a tear falls from her eye. Finally in Ostermeier’s production, Nora reaches a wild climax in her dance, but Rank and Helmer join in, and it is the entrance of a censorious Mrs Linde that stops the mayhem. The image of Nora at the end of the rehearsal, wet and bleeding, is merely a precursor to the costume she wears for the fancy dress party: her whole body is cut, bleeding, bruised, and smeared with gel, to resemble a Lara Croft warrior

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exiting a violent computer game. The excess of the rehearsal is thus retrospectively connoted as a foretaste of the performance Helmer has planned for his friends. By censoring or cutting short the disturbing element of the dance, or by containing its excesses within the acceptable limits of male voyeurism, these tarantellas rule out the possibility of exposing feminine behaviour as the culturally prescribed gestures and practices of a subaltern caste.

Anxiety leading to interpretive softening, amelioration, or repression seems to be rife in both the climax of Nora’s tarantella and the abandonment of her children, but these moments are mere symptoms, and like symptoms in a medical diagnosis, they only acquire meaning when they form a recognizable pattern. When viewed together, these theatrical symptoms become significant as the two extremes of behavior that mark the character transforma- tion of Nora. Every production of A Doll’s House needs an interpretive strategy to handle Nora’s change from the ‘doll’ wife, who dances to her husband’s tune, to the rational negotiator of the final act. For the actors who play Nora, the embodying of this transition is often the critical touchstone on which their performance succeeds or fails. The transformation involves crossing a gendered binary: from a femininity associated with impulsive emotional expression (excitement, love, pride, anger, guilt, and fear), to a masculinity associated with rationality and critical intelligence. While the embodiment of this binary may be culturally specific, and has taken numerous interpretive forms, the plausibility of the transformation itself seems to be cross-culturally contentious.

In Europe and America, early reviewers of the play argued that such a radical transformation was impossible within the time span of the dramatic action.36 Their criticisms were predicated on a particular notion of subjectivity in which personal identity was shaped through experiences in early childhood, dependent on environmental forces, and evolved through a gradual process of change. Vera Kommissarzhevskaya is credited with being one of the first performers to successfully repudiate the allegation that Nora’s transformation was implausible. She played Nora as a character with two separate lives, an outer social façade, and an inner essence in which ‘she grows, acquires courage, and begins to grasp what she has never understood.’37

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In early twentieth-century Japan, the debate over Nora’s transformation revolved around the Buddhist concept of awaken- ing. The critics argued that the new woman must awaken from the illusions of the visible world and free her inner self. Nora’s claim to awaken within a period of three days was dismissed by a Japanese critic in an imaginary letter to Nora: ‘self-awakening is no simple thing. If you think that a woman can become a human being simply by doing what you did, you are wrong. One’s true self is not something that can be discovered with such ease.’38

In recent years, Judith Butler’s work on subjectivity and performativity has begun to influence critical writings on A Doll’s House.39 Butler theorizes gender as a series of regulatory norms that gain their symbolic power through constant reiteration; she argues that gendered power relations are based on the repetition of a set of habitual utterances and actions. Time is no longer a factor in subjective change, whether through a Buddhist awakening, or evolutionary development of individual psychologies; theoretically speaking, if gendered behavior becomes consciously performative it can be suspended at a moment’s notice. This interpretive innovation turns Nora into a post-modern character, with no fixed identity, only a fixed place in a social order lived as masquerade. But what happens when gendered performativity is thrown away, what constitutes masculinity and femininity in an unscripted future freed of habitual actions and utterances? This uncertainty is unnerving for any society dependent on a gender binary, which brings me neatly back to the point of my departure: the assertion that there is an enduring fascination for both artists and audiences in textual sites of anxiety.

Conclusion

This paper offers no conclusions regarding the extraordinary global success of A Doll’s House: it references the performances of a dozen Noras, in as many productions, spread out over four continents and a hundred years, but it barely scratches the surface of this extraordinarily rich production history. Instead, this paper should be read as a provocation regarding methodologies for conducting transnational studies of Ibsen’s texts. It questions the validity of

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mining a literary text to identify properties that account for global success. Rather, it suggests symptomatic readings to identify ruptures, elisions and repressions in actual performances, in order to pinpoint textual elements that provoke, disturb, and fuel interpretive innovation.

In the case of A Doll’s House this methodological shift results in a move away from a focus on both aesthetic innovation and the audience’s identification and empathy with Nora as the embodi- ment of a modernist female subject, towards a concentration on the sites of anxiety surrounding the abandonment of children and the masquerade of femininity, which in turn lead to a focus on subjective transformations in gendered behavior. This symptomatic reading suggests that A Doll’s House is a vehicle that allows an infinite variety of cultures to explore the consequences of rupturing a gendered binary that supports and maintains an unequal distribution of social power. If this is the case, it could be argued that global audiences may continue to respond to the sheer fact that Nora stops playing the gender game. But to draw conclusions on a fraction of the available evidence would be premature. A more modest attitude is called for when confronted with 801 theatre productions, twelve feature films, and ten televised adaptations,40

all of which have something to say about this fascinating theatrical conundrum.

1 Hoare (2003): 6.

2 Quoted in Shim (2004): 145. Woong Na, ‘Theatre Review of the Play A Doll’s House: I (Inhyong ui Ka Kukpyong)’, Donga Daily News (Donga Ilbo) 27 April 1934: 7.

3 Selaiha (2006): http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/810/cu1.htm:

4 Herrnstein Smith (1984): 30. This strategy, as outlined by Herrnstein Smith, was crucial to the approach used by Joanne Tompkins and myself, in our analyses of Antigone and A Doll’s House as intercultural texts in Women’s Intercultural Performance (2000). As this article demonstrates, I consider this approach problematic when it is applied to a global study.

5 Moi (2006)

6 Cima (1983)

7 Thomas William Robertson’s dramas were presented by the Bancroft Management at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in the 1860s; because

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of their realistic domestic interiors, they were referred to as ‘cup and saucer dramas’.

8 Hedda Gabler was first performed in London at the Vaudeville Theatre, on 20 April 1891; the first unbowderlised version of A Doll’s House seen in London was performed at the Royalty Theatre on 11 March 1893.

9 Marx, Zangwill (1891).

10 Quoted in Dukore (1990): 320.

11 Quoted in Senelick (1980): 478.

12 Quoted in Komisarjevsky (1929): 90. I have used the more usual spelling of Kommissarzhevsky in the text, but this publication uses the older version of the surname.

13 Matsui (1912): 162.

14 Habermas (1987): 83.

15 Eleanor Marx was so inspired by Ibsen that she learnt Norwegian and translated the first versions of Enemy of the People and The Lady from the Sea into English (Kapp 1972: p. 249); Emma Goldman published Ibsen’s plays through her Earth Mother Publishing Association (Shulman, 1998: p. 29); Olive Schreiner wrote about Nora in her journal (Kapp, 1972: p.101); and Alexandra Kollontai, in a public speech commemorating the anniversary of Ibsen’s death on March 1928 in Oslo, spoke of the inspiration of Nora to her generation (Porter, 1980: p. 447).

16 This paper was presented at the 4th International Ibsen Symposium held in Shanghai and Nanjing in November 2006, hence these details of the Chinese production history of A Doll’s House.

17 Holledge, J. and Tompkins, J. (2000): 31–36.

18 Eide (1987): 95.

19 Holledge, J. and Tompkins, J. (2000): 34.

20 Many of these reports come from the early Ibsenites, for example Olive Schreiner who wrote to Havelock Ellis, ‘I love Nora’. I was fascinated to witness the same process at work in a workshop on the play run by Kara Mjaaland and Stig Eriksson at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2006. One of the students burst into tears at the end of the workshop and declared ‘I am Nora’.

21 Ibid: 29.

22 Zhang Min’s production ran for two months at the Golden City Theatre.

23 Ibid: 34.

24 This is a complex question, and requires far deeper consideration than this paper can provide, but as an aside, I would like to draw on a cross-cultural Australian/Korean study that I conducted on the reception and representation of emotion in contemporary theatre (Holledge:2006). This cross-cultural research revealed wide disparities in the approaches used by contemporary Korean and Australian actors, yet all of them stated that they were trained in

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Stanislavskian acting techniques. If such divergences in the reception and representation of emotion exist in 2005, what enormous disparities there must have been in the performance and reception of emotion in 1935, when the globalization of the theatre was still in its infancy?

25 First performed on 26 November 2002, at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin.

26 Gamal Yakout’s production was sponsored by the Cultural Palaces’ Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre in Alexandria, and transferred to Al-Anfoushi Cultural Palace for a five-day run at the end of June. It opened the First National Egyptian Theatre Festival on 10 July and won design, direction, and emerging actress awards.

27 Selaiha’s review in the Al Ahram Weekly is worth quoting at length: ‘‘Al-Sa’id Qabil renders Helmer from the start as an affectionate, helpless and deeply insecure overgrown child, (sic) despite his swagger and outward show of authority and confidence, one cannot but feel a pang of compassion for him as he pleads with Nora. This is perhaps one reason why our first Egyptian Nora (exquisitely performed by the enchanting Iman Imam) does not bang the door behind her. She simply goes out, leaving it open; all is not quite, quite lost and there may be still a chance to bring the family together once more’’. Al Ahram Weekly 13–19 July 2006. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/803/cu1.htm

28 Lusaka Play House, Lusaka, Zambia, 14 December 2006

29 Unpublished script provided by writer.

30 Dariush Mehrjui (1993): Sara, Iran: Producers Hashem Seifi and Dariush Mehrjui.

31 This production, directed by Ali Khalifa at the National Theatre in Cairo, opened on 25 August, 2006.

32 Joan Riviere (1929): ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 307

33 For a detailed analysis of this line in Norwegian, I refer readers to the article by Knut Brynhildsvoll (2003): ‘Nora and the Forged Signature between Scriptural Imitation and Subversive Writing’: 9.

34 Patrick Garland (1973): A Doll’s House, England: Elkins Production, Freeward Films.

35 Produced by ZDF Theaterkanal and ARTE. Transmission of stage performance at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. Broadcast for the first time on the French-German TV channel ARTE on 12 June 2003. Stage director: Thomas Ostermeier; TV director: Hannes Rossacher.

36 Egil Tornqvist provides an excellent discussion on this aspect of the critical response to the early European and American productions. Tornqvist (1995): 73–79

37 Quoted in Tornqvist (1995): 76 It is ironic that this interpretive innovation is attributed to a theatrical symbolist, as it is predicated on the representation of a tension between an inner and outer life, which is a defining quality in the depiction of a psychologically realist characters.

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38 ‘H’ (1912): 138.

39 A detailed account of Judith Butler’s theories as they relate to A Doll’s House can be found in Unni Langås (2005).

40 These figures are taken from Ibsen.net.

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Imitation and Subversive Writing’, in Proceedings of the International Ibsen Conference, The Relevance of A Doll’s House – Translation and Adaptation. Bangladesh: Centre for Asian Theatre, pp. 3–13.

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Dukore, Bernand F. (Oct., 1990): ‘Karl Marx’s Youngest Daughter and A Doll’s House’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, Women and/in Drama, pp. 308–321.

Eide, E. (1987): China’s Ibsen: From Ibsen to Ibsenism. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series 55. London: Curzon Press.

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Julie Holledge is Professor of Drama and Director of the Drama Centre at Flinders University. She began her career as a director in the British alternative theatre movement in the seventies, and moved in the early eighties to Australia, where she established the Australian Performance Laboratory (APL), a research centre for performance at Flinders University. The current focus of the laboratory is intercultural performance and new technologies. In addition to her activities as APL director, Julie Holledge has published extensively in the field of women’s performance. Major publications include Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre (Virago); and, with Dr Joanne Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance (Routledge). She is the Chief Investigator at the lead institution of the AusStage performing arts database project, and is currently working on a global study of A Doll’s House. E-mail: [email protected]

julie holledge

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