1879, 'A DOLL'S HOUSE' BY HENRIK IBSEN IS PREMIERED

Today, The Grandma has been reading one of her favourite plays, A Doll's House, written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and premiered on a day like today in 1879.

A Doll's House (in Danish and Bokmål Et dukkehjem) is a three-act play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.  

It premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town circa 1879.

The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who at the time in Norway lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world, despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play. It was a great sensation at the time, and caused a storm of outraged controversy that went beyond the theatre to the world of newspapers and society.

In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most performed play that year. UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.

The title of the play is most commonly translated as A Doll's House, though some scholars use A Doll House. John Simon says that A Doll's House is the British term for what [Americans] call a dollhouse. Egil Törnqvist says of the alternative title: Rather than being superior to the traditional rendering, it simply sounds more idiomatic to Americans.

Ibsen's German agent felt that the original ending would not play well in German theatres. In addition, copyright laws of the time would not preserve Ibsen's original work. Therefore, for it to be considered acceptable, and prevent the translator from altering his work, Ibsen was forced to write an alternative ending for the German premiere. In this ending, Nora is led to her children after having argued with Torvald. Seeing them, she collapses, and as the curtain is brought down, it is implied that she stays. Ibsen later called the ending a disgrace to the original play and referred to it as a barbaric outrage. Virtually all productions today use the original ending, as do nearly all of the film versions of the play.

A Doll's House was based on the life of Laura Kieler (maiden name Laura Smith Petersen), a good friend of Ibsen. Much that happened between Nora and Torvald happened to Laura and her husband, Victor. Similar to the events in the play, Laura signed an illegal loan to save her husband's life -in this case, to find a cure for his tuberculosis. She wrote to Ibsen, asking for his recommendation of her work to his publisher, thinking that the sales of her book would repay her debt. At his refusal, she forged a check for the money. At this point she was found out. In real life, when Victor discovered about Laura's secret loan, he divorced her and had her committed to an asylum. Two years later, she returned to her husband and children at his urging, and she went on to become a well-known Danish author, living to the age of 83.

More information: Life in Norway

Ibsen wrote A Doll's House when Laura Kieler had been committed to the asylum. The fate of this friend of the family shook him deeply, perhaps also because Laura had asked him to intervene at a crucial point in the scandal, which he did not feel able or willing to do. Instead, he turned this life situation into an aesthetically shaped, successful drama. In the play, Nora leaves Torvald with head held high, though facing an uncertain future given the limitations single women faced in the society of the time.

Kieler eventually rebounded from the shame of the scandal and had her own successful writing career while remaining discontented with sole recognition as Ibsen's Nora years afterwards.

Ibsen started thinking about the play around May 1878, although he did not begin its first draft until a year later, having reflected on the themes and characters in the intervening period (he visualised its protagonist, Nora, for instance, as having approached him one day wearing a blue woolen dress). He outlined his conception of the play as a modern tragedy in a note written in Rome on 19 October 1878. A woman cannot be herself in modern society, he argues, since it is an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint!

Ibsen sent a fair copy of the completed play to his publisher on 15 September 1879. It was first published in Copenhagen on 4 December 1879, in an edition of 8,000 copies that sold out within a month; a second edition of 3,000 copies followed on 4 January 1880, and a third edition of 2,500 was issued on 8 March.

A Doll's House received its world premiere on 21 December 1879 at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, with Betty Hennings as Nora, Emil Poulsen as Torvald, and Peter Jerndorff as Dr. Rank.

Writing for the Norwegian newspaper Folkets Avis, the critic Erik Bøgh admired Ibsen's originality and technical mastery: Not a single declamatory phrase, no high dramatics, no drop of blood, not even a tear. Every performance of its run was sold out. Another production opened at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm, on 8 January 1880, while productions in Christiania (with Johanne Juell as Nora and Arnoldus Reimers as Torvald) and Bergen followed shortly after.

A Doll's House questions the traditional roles of men and women in 19th-century marriage. To many 19th-century Europeans, this was scandalous. The covenant of marriage was considered holy, and to portray it as Ibsen did was controversial. However, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw found Ibsen's willingness to examine society without prejudice exhilarating.

More information: The University of North Carolina

 Your home is regarded as a model home,
your life as a model life.
But all this splendor, and you along with it...
it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire.
A moment may come, a word can be spoken,
and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Henrik Ibsen