“It’s only a play”: Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Adamson’s Wife (2019), and the Relevance of Historical Theatre

Between late 2017 and the closure of the theatres in March 2020, in London alone there were at least a dozen productions of Henrik Ibsen’s plays. To mention only a few of these, at the Almeida, Robert Icke’s 2018 adaptation of The Wild Duck moved the action into the modern day, anglicized some of Ibsen’s less accessible Norwegian names, and in an era of “fake news,” emphasized Ibsen’s thematic preoccupation with truth and lies. Elinor Cook’s 2017 The Lady from the Sea, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah at the Donmar Warehouse, transposed the action to an unnamed Caribbean island in the 1950s, emphasizing the thematic claustrophobia and entrapment of the piece. Stef Smith’s Nora, which premiered at Tramway, Glasgow in March 2019, was mid-run at the Young Vic when theatres closed. Smith’s adaptation modernized the piece, too: the structure and story followed those of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but in each act three separate timelines—three Noras—intersected to comment on the unchanging nature of the oppression Ibsen’s Nora faced. Tanika Gupta also turned to A Doll’s House, setting her 2019 Lyric Hammersmith production in late-nineteenth-century Kolkata. The shift in setting, though much of the dialogue and action remained the same, brought out new elements of oppression, and highlighted the enduring relevance of the marginalized figure’s search for freedom. By emphasizing imperial oppression alongside that of gender, Gupta shifted Ibsen’s social commentary to fit a present moment much more deeply concerned with intersectionality. Each of these examples, in adapting Ibsen’s works to be presented to a twenty-first-century audience, emphasize the continued relevance of the plays’ themes, characters, and social commentary.¹

Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is one of the most frequently adapted European playwrights, appearing annually in productions all over the globe. Shakespeare’s ubiquity is often credited to the apparent universality of characters such as Hamlet and Juliet, and of the messages and themes underlying many of his most-performed plays. These stories translate well into other languages, time periods, and situations, and can easily be adapted—as countless productions over the centuries since Shakespeare’s death have proved—to speak directly to seemingly distinct cultural contexts. Ibsen’s continued and international popularity, in contrast, seems to stem more from the enduring relevance of his scenarios. Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins, writing of A Doll’s House (1879) specifically, note that

The conditions that supported the promotion and dissemination of Et dukkehjem during this first wave of international success disappeared with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, but the connections between the play and other sexual vectors of social change have never disappeared. The character of Nora has continued to attract artists who are intent on challenging social discrimination.²

The initial “conditions” Holledge et al note as fostering the success of Ibsen in the last decades of the nineteenth century still characterize much of the world: the injustices and oppressive practices Ibsen wrote against continue today, if perhaps in different forms. Awo Mana Asiedu, writing of Tracie Chimo Utoh-Ezeajugh’s Nneora: An African Doll’s House (2005), credits this continued adaptability and relevance to “the human element, which is universally recognisable, that makes it possible for a play written centuries earlier to have abiding relevance when translated into another culture in another time.”³ From their earliest performances, Ibsen’s social problem plays have continued to address the oppressive tendencies of society. The specific instances of oppression shift over time and by location, as the plays are adapted to fit new circumstances, but the underlying need to fight for change remains constant.

Playwright Samuel Adamson has developed a reputation as an adaptor, and particularly as an adaptor of Ibsen. In this article, I examine Adamson’s most recent interaction with Ibsen: Wife (Kiln Theatre, 2019). As Adamson noted in a July 2020 Zoom conversation with Kiln artistic director Indhu Rubasingham...