"A Doll House"

I just finished a play called “A Doll House” by Heinrich Ibsen for my class at the Fine Arts Center. It was a revolutionary play when it was first produced because it has a female main character who has a mind of her own. Nora is a model wife of the times – she allows her husband to pamper her and she becomes just a plaything to him – but Nora sometimes doesn’t tell her husband the truth, especially when she takes out a loan and forges her father’s signature just to give her husband a vacation. Nora has a complete turnaround by the end of the play and she puts her foot down in a very unexpected way; I won’t ruin the play by telling the ending though.
When I was first reading this play, it was just a really long and boring homework assignment that I had to do for my class at the Fine Arts Center and after I finished it, I have to admit that I really hated it. I even was talking to my mom – who’s loved theatre as much as I do – about how much I hated it and she told me that she loved Ibsen’s plays. I thought that she was crazy and I didn’t give the play much more thought until the next day at the Fine Arts Center.
Our teacher told us to grab a pencil and paper and be prepared to take notes on the play. I wondered how many notes we could possibly take on a twenty page play that really stunk and I knew that we would spend the whole two hour class talking about this play.
As we started talking about the play, I began to realize that it wasn’t as bad as I first thought. Ibsen, as a man wrote a feminist play that most likely shocked and insulted audience members – well to do men, at the time. I was shocked to realize that the play was considered racy when it first came out because it reads a little dry for a modern audience. The play was also revolutionary because the theatre audience had been accustomed to melodramatic performances that were solely for the audience. But “A Doll House” takes place in one room, fairly intimate setting, of a house and this was almost the first play where the characters talked to one another instead of the audience; I really found that interesting and it made me look at the play differently.
Ibsen also created several deeper layers to the main character, Nora, that are nonexistent at a first look. Nora first appears to be slightly absentminded and fragile when she first comes in, but then – and I really found this cool – she changes slightly to suit whoever she is talking to and what she wants from that person. With her husband, she becomes his doll, his prize wife, and she allows him to think that he is taking care of her, and with her friend, Kristine, she unconsciously brags and tries to make the older woman believe that Nora is doing more with her life than she really is.
After finding out all the background of the play, I really began to appreciate it. All in all, it was an okay play and I would not recommend reading it because it gets a little dry through the middle and the end, but I think that the play would be interesting to see on the stage just to see what the people were seeing when it first came out and to know that the play was ahead of its time.