Tracing the parallels between Ibsen and Mohan Rakesh
Actress Ira Dubey, who is playing the lead role in a new production of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play Doll’s House, which was recently staged at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, speaks to Pradhuman Sodha.
though these women are very different. Nora could be a younger version of Savitri, as she is more idealistic and even though she doesn’t have much to go on, she hopes and believes in her husband’s love. Whereas Savitri is a grown woman, sole bread winner, working all hours to make ends meet for herself and her children. The life she has led has made her more practical, cynical and almost paranoid. But they both are victims of the patriarchal world.
[Savitri is the protagonist of Aadhe Adhure played, in its latest stage adaptation by Lillete Dubey.]
Q. Mrs. Linde, the other female character in Ibsen’s play, like Nora’s husband, believes in hard work and honesty, but, unlike the husband, he does not take such a black-and-white view of Nora’s mistakes. Why do you think that is?
A. Mrs. Linde is a very different woman from Nora. She was not well-off from childhood and didn’t have a love marriage. She married because she needed to marry to improve her family’s situation financially. And even after that she had to face much trouble in life. So she herself had made many compromises in life. She is in many ways more mature than both Nora and her husband. All this might have made her understand Nora’s actions but she was very adamant that Nora shouldn’t hide anything from Torvald. She helps Nora only on that condition.
Q. There is a triangular relation operating in this play, between Nora, Torvald and Dr. Rank. How do you interpret that? And is Nora and Dr. Rank’s relationship similar to Savitri and Jagmohan’s relationship in Aadhe Adhure? A.
This is a very interesting feature of the play. Such a situation, we might see unobserved in regular relations but when it is shown to us in a play or a movie we find it very shocking or moving. Dr. Rank is very close to both the husband and the wife. His relationship is almost indulgent with Nora. But later we find out that he loved her more than she loved him. Nora loved him as a friend and
Ashe always saw him more as her husband’s friend.
Jagmohan, on the other hand, is totally hidden from Savitri’s family. They know about him but they have never accepted him or his relationship with their mother. His visits to the house are a total trigger for Savitri’s husband. His presence is totally opposite to what Dr. Rank’s presence in the Helmer house represents. Dr. Rank is, in a way, helping them be together, whereas Jagmohan is just making things worse.
Q. How many times have you performed the play
That play is disturbingly openended and there is a lot of discussion as to whose fault it was that the family had become what it did. Whose fault do you think it was?
A. I have performed Aadhe Adhure just under a hundred times all over the world. The play is a very complicated one. At some level it is the whole family’s fault that things have gone so wrong with them. It is a portrayal of a dysfunctional family, when one member of the family gets addicted, soon it affects the whole family. The father in Aadhe Adhure is a total addict, he is used to people helping him and has been used to it for so long that he refuses to change now. This is why his family gets so pulled into it and bears the brunt of that.