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A Doll House

A DOLL HOUSE is about spiritual 'awakening' within the modern world: its possibility, difficulty and danger. The action is set at a time of symbolic rebirth, Christmas, the time of the death of the old year and the birth of the new. This seasonal feast, in Norway, is given the pagan name of 'Yule' and has the pagan associations of feasting, dancing, gifts and the good life in materialist terms. TORVALD and NORA HELMER both live in an illusory, false, 'doll house' and need to be expelled from this false Eden. If it is Nora who awakens first, this is because it is she, and not Torvald, who has been put through the violent shocks of three days drastic self-examination and examination of her world. But the play ends with Torvald, and the possibility of his awakening too.

There are TWO couples in this play that will experience this 'turning point' of the year in radically different ways. One couple has the pagan names TORVALD (Thor) and NORA (Eleonora/Helen). They perform the pagan celebration: the Yule tree, the gifts, the tarantella dance, the feasting. In the last act they are heard dancing, in a room above, just before their world is about to be devastated. Below, are CHRISTINE and KROGSTAD, whose lives of sorrow, forgiveness, reconciliation, (embodying the Christian aspect of the season) move in the opposite direction from devastation to happiness.

The themes of the play, therefore, explore beyond the dimensions of particular social issues with which the play long has been associated. These issues are only one component of the rich human drama opened up by the dialectical action.