Henrik Ibsen's provocative 1879 domestic drama, A Doll's House, ends with the slamming of a door. So it's a fitting symmetry that Lucas Hnath's imagined sequel begins with a knock.
Nora Helmer has returned to the threshold of her old life. It's been fifteen years since she walked out of the house she now stands in front of. Fifteen years since she left her husband, Torvald, and her three children, in a shocking act of independence that was all but unthinkable for someone of her sex and class. Breaking her marriage vows and shunning her responsibilities as a mother, she rejected a seemingly privileged existence. In reality, abandoning her family was self-preservation; an escape from the smothering, corrosive oppression of living without any meaningful agency.
When audiences stepped out into the bitter Danish winter's night following A Doll's House's Copenhagen premiere, the air was thick with a breathless mix of outrage and exhilaration. The scale of the taboos Ibsen dared to confront, questioning the permanence of marriage and right of patriarchal rule - the very bedrock of civilised society at the time - guaranteed the play's legacy as one of the most courageous contributions to theatrical literature that would come to be known as a watershed expression of feminism on stage.
So, I'll admit to raising an eyebrow at the prospect of Hnath's attempt at a Part 2. The mere premise of this play - an exploration of the many what-ifs churning in the wake of Ibsen's antiheroine - is audacious, to say the least; taking ownership of such a revered masterwork implies a boldness teetering on the wrong side of hubris. It might also seem a cop out to riff on such a well-known play, especially given the relative safety of Ibsen's once controversial ideas today. But Hnath is not merely riding Ibsen's coattails. Nor is he writing navel-gazing fan-fiction. From the opening exchanges, he makes a striking case for what potential remains untapped in the story of Norma Helmer, and with an unfussy, contemporary vernacular, reinvigorates a social rhetoric rooted long in the past.
But not only does Hnath manage to reveal surprisingly contemporary facets to Ibsen's 19th-century characters, this staging also finds a savvy, engaging tone that will be as rewarding for Ibsen newcomers as it is for theatre veterans. Set a decade and a half after the events of Ibsen's original, it seems Nora has made good on her emancipation. She's become a woman of means, raising herself up from the ashes of her broken marriage, and even finding a way to capitalise on her rebellion; she now earns a lucrative living writing about the ways a wife can make a jailbreak from prison of matrimony. But now she has returned to the house she once fled, and not for a reconciliation. Championing such radical ideas has made Nora some powerful enemies, and only her long-deserted family can now save her from the threat of total ruin.
One of this play's most impressive traits is the impartiality with which Hnath develops Ibsen's characters. Part 2 is neither an homage or a rebuttal to its source material, but rather an investigation of an ambiguous moral paradigm. Far from merely raking-over the same dramatic territory as Ibsen, Hnath strikes out into a very different emotional landscape. The suffocation, internalised turmoil and social sensationalism of the original is replaced by a more taut spectrum of feeling: urgency, desperation, manipulation and furious, heartbreaking resentment. People change, so Nora insists, and the years, the lies and the repercussions of her fateful revolt have left none of these characters unaltered.
And ultimately, it's these changes, and the way Hnath has shifted the tent poles of Ibsen's character dynamics, that really drives this play - there's a somewhat intriguing plot, with nods to blackmail and forged signatures and misogynist bureaucracy ala 'Part 1', but it's psychology more than story that keeps the audience in their seats.
And also, in the case of this MTC staging, a stellar cast, sharp direction and an elegantly restrained design (albeit with a couple of superfluous eccentricities), all working in concert to make this a truly standout evening of theatre. Director Sarah Goodes continues to prove herself as one of our most assured theatre markers, most especially with work such as this, that exists in a vocabulary of hushed realism that thrums with visceral electricity just beneath the surface.
Marta Dusseldorp delivers a thrillingly dynamic account of Nora. Hnath toes a fine line with a characterisation that is by turns admirably uncompromising and downright unlikeable, and Dusseldorp finds the perfect physicality and tempo to make this complex equilibrium sing. As Torvald, Greg Stone shoulders perhaps the most oblique role and does so effortlessly. Traditionally a totem of the emotionally blinkered, middle-class elite, Stone gifts Torvald with an incredibly compelling humanity. He too is now snared in the steel-trap of social expectations, unable, as a man, to reveal the shame and vulnerability that have stained the years since Nora left.
As the Helmer family's long-serving nanny turned-housekeeper, Anne Marie, the ever-extraordinary Deidre Rubenstein brings a thoroughly endearing warmth to the stage, but it's Zoe Terakes as Nora and Torvald's now grown-up daughter Emmy, who particularly impresses - no mean feat in a production headlined by such heavyweight theatre stalwarts. Emmy is a role that could easily seem overwritten or unwieldy in less skilled hands, and her importance for introducing the influence of love into such a loaded study of traditional marriage could very well be overshadowed by Nora and Torvald's sparring. But Terakes is capable of extraordinary detail. It's a performance that showcases agility and restraint, chutzpah and delicacy, and the kind of precision that many actors spend a career refining.
Melbourne Theatre Company presents A Doll's House, Part 2, until 15 Sep at Southbank Theatre.
