Nora

“I’d like to tear the whole damn lot apart!”

Nora saved her husband’s life – but when she finds herself in trouble, he fails to stand by her. Nora’s image of their equal relationship collapses. Radically progressive for a woman of the late 19th century, she has the courage to break out of her patriarchal family, renounce her bourgeois privileges and embark on a new life with an entirely unknown outcome. She is a symbol of courage and a willingness to change – and she was not only a provocation for her own era when Nora antagonised the censors: artists continue to be fascinated by her story, exploring it in literature, film and the theatre. Through her unconditional, relentless questioning of her life choices, Nora remains a role model for freethinkers to the present day.

For Felicitas Brucker’s production of Nora (premiere: 30 September 2022 at the Schauspielhaus), writers Sivan Ben Yishai, Gerhild Steinbuch and Ivna Žic react to the legend of Ibsen’s Nora with overwriting and new texts – interrogating it for today’s world and developing it further.