We grew up in this story

Nora has done it. Well, at least she believes she has almost done it. All that is left is the final payment on the loan she took out under a pretext and without her husband Torvald’s knowledge to fund his vital sabbatical. Nora has saved her husband’s life – but how will he react when she herself gets into trouble? Shortly before the debt is paid off, 72 hours before Christmas, all the assumptions she has about their relationship are put to the test and Nora is quickly facing some drastic life decisions. Her image of her equal marriage collapses. Radically progressive for a woman of the late 19th century, she has the courage to break free from the patriarchal family structure, renounce her bourgeois privilege and embark on a new life whose outcome is entirely unknown.

Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is one of the few classic works to have had a number of different endings penned by its author himself. Ibsen originally conceived a version in which Nora commits suicide before deciding upon the now familiar original ending: Nora breaks free from her family and leaves her husband and children behind to set off into an unknown future. Ibsen’s play was hugely controversial for its time. Originally written in 1879 and premiered in Copenhagen, the play’s ending was rejected by the censors. Ibsen added a new conclusion in which Torvald forces his wife to look their children in the eyes one last time, after which Nora decides to stay with the family after all. Following the play’s German-language premiere in Hamburg, the original ending was first performed in Munich in 1880.

Nora or A Doll’s Home, premiered on 21 December 1879 at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, enraptured the audience and became a scandal at the same time. This then went so far that invitations to societies had a sign saying not to talk about the play.

Since then, Ibsen’s theatrical thriller has consistently inspired great artists such as Elfriede Jelinek and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to grapple with it further. Even in our contemporary history of the play’s theatrical reception, the focus has been on how to deal with the various endings – and all variations from staying to leaving to erupting have been performed.

Now three prominent playwrights of our time, Sivan Ben Yishai, Gerhild Steinbuch and Ivna Žic, are intervening in the play and, in Felicitas Brucker’s production, engaging anew with the iconic Nora. As part of this project, three new texts are being premiered and at the same time combined to form a polyphonic narrative flow.

The performance opens with a prologue by Sivan Ben Yishai who was recently named “Dramatist of the Year” by Theater heute and will be familiar to Münchner Kammerspiele audiences for her premiere of “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” which was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. In the prologue, Ben Yishai focuses on those characters who are supposedly on the fringes of Ibsen’s play: the story is told from the perspective of Nora’s childhood friend Kristine Linde while the nanny Annemarie also has a say along with the housemaid Helene and the delivery boy, who remains nameless in Ibsen’s script. Ben Yishai explores questions of class and hierarchies and broadens our view by providing perspectives beyond the bourgeois universe of the original play.

Writer and director Ivna Žic was one of the winners of the 2011 Munich Prize for the Advancement of German-Language Drama and most recently caused a sensation with her debut novel “Die Nachkommende”, which was nominated for the Swiss Book Prize. She was an in-house playwright at the Lucerne Theatre and wrote several commissioned plays for the Vienna Schauspielhaus. She works as a director in Zurich, Vienna and Bremen, among other places. In her text “Noras Kinder” (Nora’s Children), she lets the next generation from the future have their say and look back on her own family.

Gerhild Steinbuch, as the author, continuously accompanied the rehearsal process and intervenes, on the one hand, in the famous scene in which Nora rehearses her dance performance at the costume ball. Later, she has Linde and Krogstad take a disturbingly brutal look at the party where Nora and Torvald are still dancing shortly before the showdown of the play. In exchange with the production team, Steinbuch also developed a present-day version of the last scene and interlocks Ibsen’s language with her own, contemporary one.

Director Felicitas Brucker invents equally diverse theatrical styles for this multi-perspective theatrical thriller - between a very pure beginning focused entirely on the language of Sivan Ben Yishai to a very physical way of playing on the overturned house designed by Viva Schudt, which, played by the suggestive video art of Florian Seufert, continuously transforms in its appearance.

The fear of social relegation and the struggle for one’s own position in the social ranking, the pressure to conform to norms, to maintain successful facades - all these (fairly) contemporary sensations connect Ibsen’s characters.

The production “Nora” will premiere as a double feature with Felicitas Brucker’s production “The Freedom of a Woman” and will continue to be shown as a double feature thereafter. Both works are independent productions, and yet they mirror each other. Both revolve around the persistence of patriarchal power structures in our present.