Rewriting Nora: Ibsen, Gender, and the Struggle for Self-Determination
“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppenger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024). In early January 2025, the chamber play premiered in the intimate setting of the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research in Greenpoint, New York, produced by The Private Theatre and directed by Coppenger’s longtime collaborator, John Gould Rubin. Wharton and Dexter, who are married in real life, captivate the audience with deeply personal insights into the Helmers’ passionate marriage, which ultimately unravels due to its superficiality. The production traces Nora’s status transformation from a self-satisfied, capricious “girl” to a modern woman resolved to chart her own path in life. Yet, rather than a study of gender roles, Gould Rubin’s psychologically astute direction foregrounds Ibsen’s profound exploration of self-determination — not just for women, but for humanity as a whole.
A Doll House reveals how the Helmers’ seemingly content life falls apart over a few days. After years of financial uncertainty, lawyer Torvald has finally achieved his career goal of managing a bank. The plot begins on Christmas Eve, as a carefree and childishly playful Nora excitedly shows him the gifts she bought for the family. But Torvald — played by Dexter with remarkable poise and a hint of a Southern drawl — grumpily criticizes her spending habits, displaying both his pride and dominance. It quickly becomes apparent that their relationship is built on a fabric of dependency and control, with the couple navigating conflicts through infantile role-playing. In a scene reminiscent of overly dramatic foreplay, Nora slips into the role of the obedient “good girl,” whereas Torvald casts himself as the benevolent “daddy”— a dynamic of sex and money that underpins their marriage.
Sarah Wharton (l.), Stephen Dexter (r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
Nora, portrayed by Wharton with a charismatic fragility that belies deeper strength, carries her exuberance into the scenes that follow. In haughty euphoria, she boasts to her hapless friend Kristine (Katie Willmorth) about her “happy” life. Later, she flirts coquettishly with Dr. Rank (Victor Almanzar), an old admirer. Yet, with each scene, her carefree façade crumbles further. Years earlier, in a desperate attempt to save Torvald’s life, she had forged her father’s signature to secure a loan. Now, this criminal offense threatens to come to light. By the end of the play, she recognizes the stark contrast between bourgeois law, which condemns forgery as immoral, and her own sense of justice, which sees her action as necessary to spare her ailing father and ensure Torvald’s recovery. This realization drives Nora into a radical search for truth and freedom.
Coppenger’s new translation unlocks the world of the play for today’s American audiences, modernizing the language and highlighting the emotional complexity of Ibsen’s psychologically realistic characters. Reflecting on his effort to revive Ibsen for the 21st century, Coppenger explains that he sought to accentuate both the characters’ emotional vicissitudes and the play’s subliminal-but-omnipresent erotic tension, which had been obscured in the Victorian translation by William Archer. Equally striking is his choice of title, A Doll House, rather than Archer’s A Doll’s House with the possessive “s.” Whereas Archer’s version positions Nora as a doll-like object in Torvald’s playhouse, Coppenger’s title refers to the artificiality of a constructed domestic setting, where all characters are equally estranged.
Sarah Wharton (l.), Stephen Dexter (r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
Andreea Mincic’s set design captures the Helmers’ middle-class home with minimalist elegance and utilizes the space skillfully. A piano, dining table, lounge chair, sofa, and festive decoration suggest the apartment’s interior, with a central pillar serving as a stylized Christmas tree that Nora adorns with fairy lights and surrounds with presents. The audience sits tightly around the performance area, casting them as silent voyeurs in the Helmer home who watch the drama unfold. In a sophisticated directorial move, offstage characters sit among the audience, deliberately disrupting the theatrical illusion and effectively breaking the fourth wall. This enables Nora, for instance, to look Torvald directly in the eye while speaking to Kristine about his recovery. Torvald, however, does not look back, already foreshadowing his later refusal to acknowledge the reasons for his wife’s actions. This transdiegetic staging blurs the boundary between the domestic sphere and the outside world, demonstrating that public expectations turn the Helmers’ private refuge into a stage for societal conventions.
Gould Rubin, who has previously directed two productions of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, emphasizes that he is most fascinated by the depth of the playwright’s protagonists, which only becomes fully apparent through a precise analysis of text and characters. At first glance, the figures appear firmly rooted in their social roles, but as the play progresses, contradictions in their language and behavior reveal past actions with irrevocable consequences, which upend their otherwise predetermined lives.
Katie Willmorth (l.), Sarah Wharton (r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
Building on this dramaturgical foundation, Gould Rubin’s production unfolds as a gradual peeling away of social conventions, which ultimately culminates in Nora’s decision to leave the institution of the family to “grow up and get smart.” Wharton convincingly embodies her character’s rapid maturation — a notoriously tricky task for actresses. Her radiant smile gradually fades into a strained expression as the fear of Torvald discovering her transgression grows. Her tarantella dance, which she rehearses to please her husband, turns into a frenzied, almost convulsive fit. Her body twitches and twists in feverish desperation as if she were trying to expel the venom of her shameful act.
The tension in the Helmer household escalates in the final scene, where Nora’s long-buried secret is finally exposed. When Torvald receives a letter from the scheming Nils Krogstad (Chuk Obasi), revealing himself as Nora’s hidden creditor and threatening to expose her deception, their family’s social status is thrown into jeopardy. Torvald verbally thrashes Nora, condemning her harshly as he rattles off the consequences of her actions and frets over his own reputation. But when Krogstad’s second letter arrives, rescinding the threat, Torvald breathes a sigh of relief and exclaims, “I’m saved” — in a telling slip of the pronoun, not “we’re saved” — and immediately retracts his now-superfluous tirade to return to their previous family dynamic.
Natalie Bond, Sarah Wharton, Katie Willmorth, Chuk Obasi (from l. to r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
Like Nora, Torvald is trapped within the organization of social life under capitalism. In his roles as patriarch and bank manager, he might appear less unfree than his wife, but he lacks the ability to reflect on his own position in a world of anonymous laws and hierarchies. Inevitably, he can only assume the role expected of him: a ruthless, selfish tyrant who would destroy his own family.
But Torvald’s vicious behavior in this moment of crisis irrevocably shatters Nora’s trust and her understanding of their relationship. She not only realizes how little her husband values her as an independent person, but she also begins to question her entire outlook on politics, society, and religion. Wharton’s gestures now abandon any trace of playful femininity. Her Nora appears resolute as she exits the stage, slamming the door behind her.
In Coppenger and Gould Rubin’s version of Ibsen’s classic, the tension between the submissive, infantile role imposed on women by patriarchal society and Nora’s pursuit of self-determination finds powerful expression. From the very beginning, her exuberant, childlike joy seems forced, and by the time she delivers her parting monologue, it has completely disappeared. The audience seems relieved: now they may catch a glimpse of the person behind the artificial front. Calling out her husband with the bitter truth, Nora declares, “I went from being Papa’s doll-child to being your doll-wife.” Neither he nor her father ever saw her as an independent human being, but rather as a decorative object of exchange, a commodity within a capitalist system.
Stephen Dexter (l.), Sarah Wharton (r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
In analyzing Ibsen’s female characters in a 1937 letter to Erich Fromm, critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno observed that patriarchal society reduces the feminine character to a commodity. Since the ideal of femininity is excluded from the sphere of production and confined to the domestic and the beautiful, women are said to be more engaged in consumerism than men. As a result, the feminine character appears both to have a close relationship with commodities and to be commodified itself. Ibsen dramatizes this logic: Nora returns home with shopping bags, pleads with Torvald for money — who disparagingly calls her a “gold-digger” — and is ultimately reduced to a doll. By relegating women to this reified position, patriarchy ensures its reproduction, turning women into accomplices of the social order that oppresses them.
Nora’s escape is, therefore, much more than a break with her husband. It is both a rebellion against the norms that define femininity in capitalist society and a testament to the historical changeability of what is presumed to be the “natural” gender hierarchy. In Minima Moralia (1949), Adorno describes the role patriarchy assigns to the feminine as a “scar of social mutilation,” a condition that affects civilization as a whole but manifests most clearly in the idealized image of femininity. Any woman who, like Ibsen’s heroine, begins to perceive herself as a scar rather than continuing to function as her husband’s accessory not only takes the first step toward an undistorted understanding of femininity, but also begins to recognize subtle mechanisms of societal oppression. The female character is thus dialectically constructed: while it enforces oppression, it also provides a means for women to recognize their own subjugation and that of all humanity.
Sarah Wharton. Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
As a spectator, you feel compelled to applaud Nora for walking away from what we would today call a toxic relationship. But her emancipation remains in question: she escapes her oppressive marriage only to enter a world where she is just as unfree as everyone else.
Nevertheless, the play ends with a glimmer of hope. When Torvald echoes his wife’s words, “the biggest miracle,” a faint utopian moment hints at the possibility that, under different historical conditions, they could act as free subjects and conceive an alternative marriage model. Thus, Nora becomes a symbol of not only female autonomy but also an as-yet uncertain societal transformation in which all human beings achieve self-determination.
For contemporary audiences, who still face gender inequality despite all apparent progress, Ibsen’s play remains an unsettling mirror. The Helmers’ marital crisis is emblematic of the deeper contradictions within bourgeois society, where the ideal of universal freedom clashes with the reality of structural dependency. A Doll House exposes this paradox, which remains as relevant as ever, and connects the struggle for gender equality to the broader question of human emancipation.
One can only hope that Coppenger’s new translation, brought to life by this outstanding creative team, will continue illuminating these societal tensions in many future performances.
Stephen Dexter (l.), Sarah Wharton (r.). Courtesy of Shelby Alayne Photography.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Stephen Bagg, Jr. for his thoughtful reading and valuable feedback on this essay.
NOTES
[1] Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House: A New Translation by Royston Coppenger, (2024), 74.
[2] Ibid, 1 ff.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 6 ff.
[5] John Gould Rubin, email message to author, February 5, 2025.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibsen, 75.
[8] Ibid, 71.
[9] Ibid, 74.
[10] Theodor W. Adorno, “Adorno an Erich Fromm, London, 16.11.1937” in Theodor W. Adorno/Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel. Band I 1927–1969, ed. Christoph Gödde und Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2023), 541-542.
[11] Ibsen, 4.
[12] Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005), 95.
[13] Lillian Hingley, “The Feminine Character: The Allegory of Ibsen’s Women in Adorno’s Modernist Literary Theory,” Telos, no. 196 (2021), 62.
[14] Ibsen, 79.