Sniffing Out Moral Infection

House lights down…

Heinrik Ibsen is a highly respected Norwegian playwright, and his most famous play is, no doubt, 1879’s A Doll’s House, a before-its-time story that made a huge sensation during the Victorian Era. It was not without controversy, as it presented some scandalous ideas for the time. Less known to the public, though, was the story behind the play.

A Doll’s House been put on all over the world, including in London and on Broadway, for over a century and translated and updated many times. It’s also been filmed several times, one version of which stars Christopher Plummer, but today we’re going to look at the 1992 BBC version starring Juliette Stevenson and Trevor Eve.

The movie opens a few days before Christmas, 1879, and Nora Helmer (Juliet Stevenson) has just come home with a lot of packages for the family. She’s not quite done with her preparations, and she winkles her husband, Torvald (Trevor Eve) out of a little more money. Torvald has just been appointed manager at his job at the bank with a pretty sizeable raise, and Nora is happy to spend their newfound wealth before Torvald makes it.

Things have a way of catching up with people, however, and Nora’s old school friend, Kristine (Geraldine James) comes back into her life after her husband and mother have died. She needs a job, and Nora promises to put in a good word for her with Torvald. This is when we start to see that Nora is a bit self-absorbed and has been a spendthrift for most of her life.

Speaking of life, Nora has some pretty shaky relationships with men. Nils Krogstad (David Calder), a man she’s borrowed money from, comes to tell her she needs to help him restore his reputation by getting him his job back at the bank. If she doesn’t, he’ll tell her husband she not only borrowed money without his permission, but she forged her dad’s signature to do it even though her dad had died a few days before the signature was dated. Nora, who borrowed the money to help cure Torvald when he was sick is aghast, but there’s nothing she can do except appease Krogstad as much as she can.

Other than that, Nora tries to pretend everything is normal and does whatever she can to keep Torvald from finding out, but her secret weighs heavily on her. She and Torvald go to a Christmas costume party, where Nora has promised to dance a tarantella, which is ironic, considering she’s trying to rid herself of what would have been a shameful secret. It also doesn’t help that Dr. Rank (Patrick Malahide), an old family friend, confesses he’s in love with her, and with all the trouble she’s got herself into, Nora finds herself temporarily tempted to give in.

Eventually, Nora’s secret catches up with her, but there’s more to Krogstad than meets the eye, and for that matter, Kristine, and no, I won’t spoil anything. Just for clarity’s sake, though, I have to mention that Nora decides to leave both Torvald and her children because she realizes Torvald expects her to be nothing but a doll in a bandbox, but she knows nothing about herself. Torvald pleads with her, but Nora’s mind is made up, and she lovingly releases Torvald from their marriage before walking out.

A Doll’s House which is entitled Et dukkhejem in Norwegian, was first published and performed in the same year, and Victorians were horrified that Nora would leave her own children. The backlash was swift. It was bad enough that Ibsen chose to go against the trends of the time and write about the working classes, but to call out inequalities and show a wife leaving her husband? The horror!

It was no small thing for a woman to leave in that era, either. It didn’t matter where she lived or what class she was in. There were limited professions open to her, she often lost custody of her children, and maybe she only got out with the clothes on her back. It’s rather horrifying to think about fleeing a bad marriage and having to leave one’s children in a harmful environment, but women certainly must have done it.

A Doll’s House was more than a commentary on women and marriage. Ibsen based it on the real life scandal his protege, Laura Kieler experienced when her husband took sick and Kieler forged a signature on a loan. She begged Ibsen for help, but he refused, and Kieler ended up being committed to an insane asylum by her husband. Nora was a point-for-point representation of Kieler, at least in terms of story, although Nora’s characterization as a thoughtless spendthrift didn’t flatter Kieler, either. One line of the play, in which Dr. Rank talks about “sniffing out moral infection,” probably seemed like the final turn of the screw. Kieler never forgave Ibsen for exploiting her.

The play first came to Broadway in 1889, opening on December 21 at Palmer’s Theatre, where it ran for an unknown number of performances, and it’s since been revived many times on Broadway and around the world in various forms. The latest Broadway revival starred Jessica Chastain as Nora and opened at the Hudson Theatre, putting in one-hundred seven performances.

As for the BBC film, it was an episode of the series, Performance, which is kind of like Masterpiece Theater. The Doll’s House episode was first broadcast on March 29, 1992.

The thing about these BBC Performance plays was that they didn’t take a lot of chances with the material, and A Doll’s House is a pretty straight adaptation of the play. It hasn’t been taken outside; most of the action happens inside the Helmer apartment. The actors all give very competent performances, although I thought Juliet Stevenson was a little old for her role. Nora is somewhere in her late twenties in the play, whereas Stevenson was in her late thirties at the time. She’s still wonderful, though, and Trevor Eve is a fine Torvald. The only problem I had is that the sound isn’t always great; sometimes the actors’ voices are a little muffled, which seems to be typical of these BBC plays.

Seeing A Doll’s House brought back a few memories, because I had to read it for my English major a long time ago, and once the BBC play started I realized how long ago it was. It didn’t take much to remember, though. I just wish my college essays weren’t in storage so I could have contrasted how I felt about Ibsen’s play twenty-four years ago with today.

Since that’s not possible, I’ll just stick to today, and it strikes me how much hasn’t changed about marriage, even in the Victorian Era. It’s too easy to look at that time and think that the men were supposed to be the head of the household and women had no say, but Ibsen shows Nora having the same concerns about her marriage that anyone in any other era has or should have. Do we ever communicate seriously? Why did I jump into marriage without getting to know myself first? What if women aren’t content to be dressed-up dolls in bandboxes? Walking out isn’t a solution, necessarily, unless other circumstances warrant it, but Ibsen likely thought Nora had no other option.

Incidentally, Ibsen had to change the end of the play when it was to be performed in Germany, because actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to play Nora if the original ending was left in. Ibsen hated it, calling the new ending “a barbaric outrage.”

Ibsen always said he never set out to write a feminist play, and this is true. A Doll’s House isn’t feminist so much as plain and simple exploitation, even if it makes a lot of cogent points about equality and marriage. No one is ever quite indifferent to it, in spite of more than a century passing since it was first published.

For more Broadway, please see the blogathon page here. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for the Wrapup post…

A Doll’s House is free to stream on Amazon Prime.

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