Ibsen was a writer who dominated my thinking
ever since I became a playwright, really.
I was intoxicated by them,
by their savagery and their poetry,
and the tautness of the dramaturgy.
And
Nora Helmer lives an apparently idyllic life
with her husband, Torvald Helmer, and their children.
And years — five years, I think — before the play started,
her husband had what I read as being a nervous breakdown.
In order to pay for his treatment, she borrowed money.
And has spent the last five years trying secretly to pay it back.
And the play charts the moment when she realises
that the debt is going to be found out.
At the end of the play, her husband finds out about the debt,
is appalled and she says,
"I can't live with a man who's going to contain me like this."
And she leaves.
And that was a shocking moment in European theatre,
the notion that the woman could leave her husband and leave her children.
And she slams the door!
The decision he made when he started to write
in the 1870s, is he decided to write these plays
about contemporary everyday life in his home country.
So, Ibsen is a great radical by insisting on naturalism.
I think it's received as a feminist tract
and a celebration of female independence.
While I think that's a consequence of what Ibsen was writing,
I don't think it was the intention of what Ibsen was writing.
I think Ibsen was writing, in my opinion,
something much more existentialist —
something more related to people trying to be true to themselves
and not having their identity imposed on them by other people.
I think that's definitely true of Nora.
What Nora is doing through that play
is she's struggling to be true to herself.
But for that play to really work,
you have to see what it costs her to do it.
She's not just leaving her husband.
She's leaving her kids and she'll never see her kids again.
She'll have no status in society.
She'll be a
Now, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen.
That's what's profound about it.
She realises the mess that she's made
and has to...has to change everything in order to clean it up.
That extremity, I find really extraordinary.
The play is called
Mrs Alving, who has had a marriage
with a terrible man who's now dead,
has presented him, the dad, as a model, as a remarkable figure.
There's an orphanage being built in his name
and, most importantly, she has told her son that he was an incredible man.
And he comes home for the opening
of the orphanage in the father's name.
We discover, above all, that he's ill.
He's very ill. He's got syphilis and he's going to die.
And of course, what has happened
is that he's inherited it from his dad.
His mum, who is trying to be a modern woman,
is dealing with the nightmare of how to tell him.
Should she tell him the truth or should she protect him from the truth?
Guilt and the past weighs on all of us.
Ghosts
between a mother and son — an elemental relationship.
The most heart-rending line in the whole play
is when the son, Oswald, is arguing with his mother
and says, "I didn't ask to be born!"
And this is the eternal cry of the child
who is impotent in the face of their inheritance.
I think any playwright who continues to be performed
has some sort of elemental quality.
What's fascinating about his work
is that he sits on these boiling, tumultuous, volcanic feelings
and applies a kind of lid to them
and they burst out with a sort of seismic energy.
He's a