Exposed’s Ruby Deakin had the opportunity to sit down with acclaimed playwright Chris Bush to discuss her latest creative venture – a fresh adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s iconic 1879 play ‘A Doll’s House’.
What was your initial vision for A Doll’s House?
We wanted something that feels really clean, that really blows the dust off. We’re not radically updating or transposing the play to somewhere else. It keeps it in that original setting but tries to get rid of anything that’s stopping you from really connecting with these characters, purely by virtue of it being 140 years old. We’re painting a version of this world which feels still plausibly authentic to the period but also is really going to make sense to a contemporary audience, in terms of understanding who these people are, why they’re behaving as they do, and what’s at stake if they don’t.
Though the roles and legal rights of women have changed since Ibsen first wrote the play, the questions of family, female autonomy and freedom will continue to resonate with women today. What do you consider to be the modern significance of Ibsen’s play?
You have to remember just how incredibly transgressive it was for the time. I think that’s one of the reasons why we didn’t want to update it into a modern-day setting, because of what Nora is risking and just how socially unacceptable some of her decisions are. In terms of how the power dynamics operate in the play, they still feel very truthful and fresh, showing the way in which women’s voices still aren’t heard or given weight and value.
I think the whole piece is massively about class and status as well as gender, and we’ve made some small but significant changes to the backgrounds of some characters, uncovering more of the financial situation of the family. If you’re from a background that isn’t as moneyed, if you do everything right, if you’re lovely and charming, then maybe you can exist in a structure of public society, but what you’re allowed to do within polite society is so conditional to your behaviour and ability to never deviate from a specific path. We’ve worked on being able to understand just what risk, jeopardy and need look like in this world.
How has Ibsen’s play been reinvented for the new adaptation?
Probably the most significant changes we’ve made involve the background of the characters. In this version, Nora, instead of being the daughter of a judge, has grown up in an orphanage and has been adopted by the judge. We wanted to understand why she hasn’t inherited money, among other questions which Ibsen didn’t address. Nora being adopted felt like it was an interesting way of exploring her privileged upbringing, but also her sense of gratitude from a really early age – she wasn’t here through birthright, but through somebody else’s great act of generosity. In my mind, that makes sense for a lot of her decisions and character traits and shows how her social position feels conditional based on her good behaviour.
Nora feels slightly torn between two sides, one where she performs the role of the charming wife with a well-educated, posh husband, and one where this drops when a friend from the orphanage, Christina, comes to visit. As she is doing well for herself in this grand apartment, she feels the need to say ‘Yes, I’ve got all of this, but I’m still me.’
Ibsen’s original script focuses on an all-white, upper-middle-class household, which the Crucible adaptation has reimagined for a more diverse cast. How would you describe the impact of these racial differences, and how do these differences influence the ideas of the play?
From that early conversation, there was no way we were going to have an all-white production, so we were in a position of either colourblind casting or colour-conscious casting. Nineteenth-century Norway was so dominantly white, but not entirely. We wanted to cast the best people we could, so parts weren’t specifically written for certain racial backgrounds, but we wanted to make sure we could tinker a little bit afterwards and make sure there was that flexibility in the text.
It feels like we’re moving away from colourblind casting, and colour-conscious casting feels far more artistically satisfying, but also, it’s the right thing to do. It’s a slight tightrope walk between allowing the racial implications to be explored if the actors and company are interested in exploring them, without stating that this version of A Doll’s House is specifically about race. It still feels like the world of the original, but we open it up a bit.
The idea for the stage set is relatively simple, taking place within a single room. This leaves the actors exposed throughout the play, and this is clearly heightened by the Crucible’s thrust stage layout. What did you have in mind when considering the staging?
One of the reasons I love the Crucible and the dimensions of that stage is you can’t get too fussy in terms of the design, because you need to keep that expanse and that openness. Ibsen liked to write huge dense paragraphs of scene-setting, telling you the colour of the couch or how many flowers are in the vase, and we’re stripping a lot of that out. Capturing that incredible open space and being able to see that movement, it feels like you’re always seeing it more in three dimensions than in a little picture frame set.
There are a few lovely little tricks in this set design which echo the idea of Russian dolls, and the layers within layers feels interesting for a Doll’s House. It’s going to be very exciting.
The final scene of A Doll’s House is often thought to be the most impactful, though the play is famed for having multiple endings as the original finale was deemed too outrageous at one of its earliest performances. What were your thoughts when considering staging the final scene, and what impact did you want the ending to have?
The final beat of the show is something that people won’t have seen in A Doll’s House before. It’s not changing the ending as Ibsen has written it, but it’s a final moment beyond that, which feels like it’s going to be a satisfying moment.
From a 21st-century perspective, if there weren’t kids in the play, it would be easy to understand that Nora is leaving and starting a new life. But you’ve got young children in the mix that she doesn’t take with her. In this version, Nora’s kids are still there but never physically in front of us, which was another challenge. We have to make them feel real enough for her that we don’t forget their presence and portray what a rift it is for her to tear herself away from them.
What do you hope people will take away from the performances?
For those who know it, I hope people are going to go away having seen a production that isn’t radically inverting what they know of A Doll’s House, but one that looks beautiful, that has absolutely world-class performances, and that maybe illuminates a level of emotional truth behind some of those characters.
Equally, I’m hoping that a significant proportion of our audience won’t have any familiarity with A Doll’s House at all. They will see a story of a woman who we meet thinking that she has achieved everything that she’s ever wanted, and who, through a series of crises and revelations, takes steps to liberate herself at no small degree of cost, both to herself and others.
A Doll’s House will run at the Crucible from Sat 21 Sept – Sat 12 Oct. Tickets and more info available from sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.
