The Doll’s House door reopens for Nora — 15 years on
WHEN Henrik Ibsen’s nora slams that door shut at the end of A Doll’s House, that’s it. Close of play.
That is, until lucas Hnath came up with the brilliant idea for A Doll’s House, part 2: a scorching new work (with eight Tony nominations) directed by Sam Gold on Broadway, and starring laurie Metcalf as nora Helmer 15 years after she walked out on her husband and children in the original.
Metcalf has been nominated for a best actress Tony for her superb portrait of a woman who survived a suffocating marriage to a man who felt ‘her life was as his little wife’.
The actress said she relished reinventing one of the most famous characters in theatre. ‘ I felt ok, because the nora we know from the original is not the same nora 15 years later.
‘She is a new woman; and I felt like I had a free pass to show what had been bottled up inside of her, that no one would ever have seen if she had not gone away and opened her life to new experiences,’ Metcalf told me over the phone from new York.
After walking out, this nora goes off and writes books. Successful ones; about how marriage is cruel, and destroys women’s lives.
The piece isn’t a feminist tract. But so what if it were? What’s beautiful about A Doll’s House, part 2 is its comic rhythm. It’s very funny in places.
‘When the play was given to me, I saw the title and I assumed there was some humour in it,’ Metcalf said. ‘It became my goal to add some more.’
Her cast mates — Chris Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola rashad — know where to locate the laugh lines, and have (along with the play) also been nominated for Tony awards.
Metcalf’s funnybone was honed in the theatre and on television, in shows such as roseanne, in which she played roseanne’s sister Jackie in the nine-year run.
She and the original cast will reprise their roles over eight episodes being filmed for ABC in the U. S. They’re bound to come to the UK, where roseanne had a lot of fans.
‘I don’ t know where roseanne’s going with this thing,’ Metcalf told me, ‘ but we’re going to pick up where they are in 2017. It could be a divided household, depending on who voted for who,’ she added. ‘It will be very timely; a representative of a huge chunk of America.’ A Doll’s House, part 2 feels very timely, too; coming after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton — and all the misogyny surrounding that. The play was workshopped in the States before the election. ‘In our little artistic bubble we were very certain of Hillary Clinton’s win; and we worked on the end of the play to give it a sense that the glass ceiling had been cracked, and that a female president was in the White House . . . and here’s nora Helmer, and you can perceive her as paving the way!’ says Metcalf. ‘Well, we’re starting from scratch all over again, aren’t we?’ I saw A Doll’s House, part 2 back in March, and I knew then that it would work here. Metcalf will star with Glenda Jackson in edward Albee’s Three Tall Women on Broadway from February, but discussions have begun about her and Hnath’s play coming to london later in 2018. She said she hadn’t heard a word about it, but predicted a play with four characters and no set would do exceedingly well, pretty much anywhere. ‘All you need is a big old door,’ she said.