Midterm Study Guide -- Spring 2008 -- plays (A Doll's House)

  At this point, our unit on drama is not yet finished.  (After break, we will read Mother Courage and The Love Suicides, a German play and a Japanese play respectively.  If you saw Chicago, you may find some of Brecht's techniques in Mother Courage a little familiar.)

This study guide will focus on A Doll's House and an overall discussion of drama and theater.

-- Drama refers to the author's play script as it is published.  Theater, on the other hand, refers to the performance of the play and all the "extra-textual" elements: casting, costumes, sets, mise-en-scene, the reading of lines, sound, lighting, music, and venue.  For example, a performance of A Doll's House at the Theater Arts Arena will be very different from a performance of the same play in a park or in a classroom.

-- An important element of theater is the central idea of a performance.  This central idea will determine casting, staging, costuming, and even reading of lines.  The central idea will also affect the audience just as much as an audience may determine a play's central idea.  Audiences who see many plays and are willing to experiment will accept a more adventurous production and central idea.  Audiences who see fewer plays will probably be more conservative.

-- A Doll's House (1879) is one of Ibsen's problem plays.  In other words, in this play, Ibsen (1829-1906) explored a pressing issue and encouraged his audience to think about it.  He guides his audience rather than telling them what to think or entertaining them.  The problem play relies on a proscenium arch stage, which frames the action and distances it from the audience.  (Did you know that in Aphra Behn's day wealthy theatergoers could sit on the stage--and leer at the actresses & smirk at the audience?!) Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and wrote in that language, but his plays were quickly translated into English and became popular for more intellectual audiences.  Ibsen's advocates in English included the great novelist and would-be playwright Henry James, theater critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the actor Elizabeth Robins.  Another advocate was our anthology's translator, William Archer (1856-1924).

-- The BBC version of A Doll's House that we saw in class dates from 1992.  There Juliet Stevenson plays Nora, and Trevor Eve plays Helmer.  This version is fairly conservative: it is set in the 1870s, and the scenes that we saw were indoors.  Other noted  versions of A Doll's House on film were theatrically-released movies from the 1970s: one starring Claire Bloom and another starring Jane Fonda (see above).