A Doll's House

A Doll’s House was a revolutionary play, for it was among the first stage dramas of the 19th Century to depict, with extraordinary skill, ordinary life realistically instead of romantically and sentimentally. In so doing, it exposed dirty little secrets about the middle-class values of Norwegians and other Europeans. On a single stage, set up as a single room where all the action takes place, Ibsen slowly opened a fester, allowing the pus to run with hypocrisy, inequality, condescension, deception. The ending of the play shocked audiences of Ibsen's time. Some producers reworked the ending before staging the drama. Today, A Doll’s House represents a turning point in the history of drama. Professor Bjørn Hemmer has written: "More than anyone, he [Ibsen] gave theatrical art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical gravity, a psychological depth, and a social significance which the theatre had lacked since the days of Shakespeare. In this manner, Ibsen strongly contributed to giving European drama a vitality and artistic quality comparable to the ancient Greek tragedies."