Sivan Ben Yishai takes on the creations of Henrik Ibsen in this entertaining rewriting and restaging of A Doll’s House, reexamining the 1879 classic with her signature comedic criticality. Under the adept direction of Anica Tomić, Nora or how one composts the master’s house returns the footnotes and overshadowed figures of the original text to centre stage.
They take up space in a house whose rooms are all exposed to the audience, inviting us to think through the power relations that the original work obfuscated. The key figure of Ibsen’s text, Nora, is no longer the model modern subject looking for liberation. Rather, actress Anja Schneider shrewdly incarnates her as a white middle-class feminist who purposefully ignores issues of class or race – an entrepreneur invested in the discourse of female victimhood as a means to maintain her power over the people who work for her.
In this case, the home is not simply Nora’s cage, but also a prison for her overlooked staff: the nanny Anne-Marie and the maid Helene, given new life by Steffi Krautz and Lisa Birke Balzer. Ultimately, the performance seeks to dismantle the house entirely. In an epilogue that verges on the didactic, it insists on a natural decay that will see male figures like Ibsen replaced. Indeed, the play ends by invoking the insects of decay, suggesting this composting is already in process: “We sang for the maggots and the maggots came.” ★★★★
- Deutsches Theater, Schumannstr.13A, Mitte, German with English surtitles, July 10, details.
