57 Fun Facts About A Doll's House

Which sweets, banned by Torvald, does Nora nibble in secret in A Doll's House?

Macaroons. Torvald has banned them for the sake of her teeth, so Nora swears she has eaten none, then tells Dr. Rank the bag was a present from a friend.

A Doll's House is a Norwegian classic, yet in which foreign capital did it have its world premiere?

Copenhagen. Ibsen's publisher was based there; the book had been on sale for 17 days, and the first night sold out.

In A Doll's House, how did Nora secretly earn money one winter to pay off her debt?

Copying documents at night. She locked herself away to write every evening until late, exhausted but thrilled: earning money of her own, she tells her old friend, felt 'like being a man'.

What was the original 1879 title of A Doll's House?

Et dukkehjem. Its first German translator retitled the play Nora, and the name caught on there: Ibsen himself calls it 'Nora' in a letter about the German productions.

What new position has Torvald Helmer just won as A Doll's House begins?

Bank manager. Torvald, a lawyer who turned down shady cases, starts in the New Year, and the promise of a big salary is why Nora feels free to overspend on presents.

How does Dr. Rank let the Helmers know he has gone home to die?

Cards marked with a black cross. Rank had told Nora what the mark would mean: he wanted to spare the squeamish Torvald his sickroom, so two visiting cards say goodbye instead.

What crime did Nora commit to get the loan for Torvald's rest cure?

She forged her father's signature. He was dying and she would not trouble him, but she dated it some days after his death, and that slip is what the lender holds over her.

To which country did the Helmers travel for Torvald's health, using the secretly borrowed money?

Italy. The doctors warned Nora, not Torvald, that his life was in danger, so she passed the year abroad off as her own whim and never told him where the money came from.

Told by Torvald that she is 'before all else a wife and a mother', what does Nora say she is first?

A human being. 'Just as you are,' she adds, 'or at all events I must try and become one', and she will no longer settle for what most people say or what is found in books.

Which old school friend of Nora's arrives seeking work at the start of Act One?

Kristine. Widowed and penniless, Mrs. Linde gets her job from Torvald: the very post he is taking away from the man who is blackmailing Nora.

Dr. Rank blames which illness on his father's 'youthful amusements'?

Tuberculosis of the spine. Rank jokes that his 'poor innocent spine' must suffer for his father's womanising: the play's coded way of saying inherited syphilis.

What does Dr. Rank confess to Nora in Act Two?

That he has always secretly loved her. Nora had been working up to ask him a great favour; once he has spoken she calls for the lamp and refuses to say what it was.

What does a porter deliver to the Helmers' door as A Doll's House opens?

A Christmas tree. Nora has the maid hide it so that the children will not see it until it is decorated, then tips the porter double his fee.

Which dance does Nora rehearse wildly to keep Torvald busy on the eve of the costume party?

A tarantella. The dance was long said to sweat out a tarantula's venom; Torvald remarks that Nora is dancing as if her life depended on it, and she answers, 'So it does.'

Where does Krogstad leave his written account of Nora's crime?

In Torvald's locked letter box. Only Torvald keeps the key, so Nora is reduced to working at the lock with a hairpin, which he later finds there, broken.

Which two creatures does Torvald use as pet names for Nora?

Squirrel and skylark. The skylark came from life: it was Ibsen's own pet name for the young writer whose secret debts gave him the plot.

Why does Torvald insist on dismissing Krogstad even though he calls him a good worker?

He takes too familiar a tone. The two were friends as boys, and Krogstad still hails Torvald like an old chum in front of the staff, which Torvald says would make his position intolerable.

Why did Mrs. Linde marry her late husband rather than Krogstad?

To support her sick mother and siblings. With her mother dead and her brothers grown, she tells Krogstad she needs someone to work for, and proposes that the two of them join forces.

Why does Mrs. Linde stop Krogstad from taking back his letter?

She thinks Torvald should know the truth. After a day in the house she tells Krogstad the couple must reach a full understanding, which is impossible amid so much concealment.

How does Torvald react on first reading Krogstad's letter?

He calls her unfit to raise their children. He rages that she has wrecked his happiness and that they must keep up appearances; minutes later, once he is safe, he forgives everything.

What does Torvald do with the returned bond and Krogstad's letters?

Burns them. 'I am saved!' he cries, and Nora has to ask, 'And I?', before he tears up the bond and both letters and throws them into the stove.

What had Nora expected Torvald to do when the scandal broke?

Sacrifice his reputation to protect her. She was ready to kill herself to stop him taking the blame; instead he tells her that no man gives up his honour for the one he loves.

What two things does Nora leave with Torvald when she walks out?

Her keys and wedding ring. Nora asks for her own ring back too, frees Torvald from every obligation to her, and says she can accept nothing from a stranger.

What sound ends A Doll's House?

The front door closing. It shuts somewhere below a second after Torvald's last flicker of hope; in 1905 the critic James Huneker wrote that the slam 'reverberated across the roof of the world'.

In one standard translation, what does Nora say must happen before she could return?

The most wonderful thing of all. Other translators make it 'the miracle of miracles'; either way, both of them would have to change until their life together became a real marriage.

Why did Ibsen write the alternative ending in which Nora stays?

German theatres would adapt it anyway. With no copyright treaty to protect him, Ibsen chose to commit the 'barbaric act of violence' himself; the star Hedwig Niemann-Raabe is said to have refused to play a mother who walks out.

In Ibsen's alternative ending to A Doll's House, what makes Nora stay?

She is led to see her sleeping children. Torvald drags her to the nursery door and says they will wake up motherless, 'as you once were'; she sinks down, saying she sins against herself.

Which writer friend of Ibsen's, sent to an asylum after her secret debts came out, was the model for Nora?

Laura Kieler. Ibsen had encouraged her writing, yet refused to recommend the novel she hoped would clear her debts; once the play appeared she spent years asking him to deny that she was Nora.

What did the real-life model for Nora need her secret loan for?

A trip south for her husband's health. Life then outdid the play: when the debts came out her husband had her committed and kept the children from her, though he later took her back.

How did Ibsen describe A Doll's House in his first notes for it, written in Rome in 1878?

A modern tragedy. The note argues that a woman 'cannot be herself' in a society whose laws are made by men and whose judges weigh her conduct 'from a masculine standpoint'.

Betty Hennings, the first Nora, trained in which art before acting?

Ballet. The choreographer August Bournonville gave Betty Hennings leading roles and wanted her made a solo dancer, but she found dancing too great a strain and chose the spoken stage instead.

A heavily rewritten A Doll's House reached the London stage in 1884 under which title?

Breaking a Butterfly. Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman moved the story to an English village, renamed Nora 'Flora' and had an old clerk steal the incriminating note, so she never has to leave.

Which pair read Nora and Krogstad at a private London performance in the mid-1880s?

Eleanor Marx and George Bernard Shaw. Karl Marx's daughter staged the reading in her own Bloomsbury sitting room, with her partner Edward Aveling as Torvald, years before a London theatre gave the play as Ibsen wrote it.

Which Swedish writer attacked Nora's walkout in the 1884 story collection Getting Married?

August Strindberg. One story in the book is itself called 'A Doll's House': a sea captain, sent Ibsen's play by his wife, underlines it in red and blue, writes a point-by-point rebuttal and wins her back.

Toasted by Norway's women's rights league in 1898, Ibsen thanked them but disclaimed what honour?

Having worked for their cause. He had written, he told the banquet, 'without any conscious thought of making propaganda', as more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people supposed.

Which Chinese writer gave a 1923 speech titled 'What happens after Nora leaves home'?

Lu Xun. He told students at a Beijing women's college that Nora had only two options, 'to fall into degradation or to return home', since without economic means of her own she had nowhere else to go.

Which actress played Nora in Joseph Losey's 1973 film of A Doll's House, shot on location in Norway?

Jane Fonda. Hers was the second film of the play to reach screens in 1973, and Variety, though struck by its looks, judged that Fonda herself was miscast as Ibsen's heroine.

Who played Torvald opposite Claire Bloom in Patrick Garland's 1973 film of A Doll's House?

Anthony Hopkins. He joined Claire Bloom when Patrick Garland filmed the staging in which she had played Nora on Broadway in 1971; a rival film of the same play appeared that same year.

Which director's stripped-down 1981 version, titled Nora, cut the servants and children from A Doll's House?

Ingmar Bergman. His Nora plays without an interval as a string of confrontations among just five characters; a New York Times critic likened it to an opera made up entirely of arias.

Who won the 2017 Tony for Best Actress as Nora in Lucas Hnath's sequel A Doll's House, Part 2?

Laurie Metcalf. Her Nora, by now a successful novelist, comes back after 15 years because she has learned that Torvald never filed the divorce papers, which leaves her legally still his wife.

Which Hollywood star played Nora in Jamie Lloyd's Broadway production of A Doll's House in 2023?

Jessica Chastain. Lloyd stripped the play to modern dress and a few wooden chairs on a revolving stage; planned for London in 2020, it was halted by the pandemic and reborn in New York.

In 2001 UNESCO inscribed Ibsen's manuscript of A Doll's House under which of its programmes?

Memory of the World. The register protects documents rather than places, and the listing takes in Ibsen's notes and drafts, where UNESCO says he states his ideas more directly than in the finished play.

In A Doll's House, Torvald was once sent as a civil servant to look into press attacks on whom?

Nora's father. He was a public official the newspapers had turned on, and Nora believes Torvald's friendly report saved his post, though Torvald now says the man was never above suspicion.

A Doll's House is set entirely in which room?

Living room. Ibsen keeps all three acts in that one room, the old unity of place, so the nursery and Torvald's study stay offstage and the audience, like Nora, is shut in.

Ibsen sat in on rehearsals for an 1880 production of A Doll's House in which German city?

Munich. It was Ibsen's home at the time, so he could watch over the staging himself; unlike the versions staged in northern Germany that year, it let Nora walk out.

What are the names of the Helmers' three children?

Ivar, Bob and Emmy. The nurse who minds them had raised Nora too, and tells her that she had to give her own baby to strangers to take the post.

Which German director made Nora Helmer, a television film of A Doll's House first broadcast in 1974?

Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He shot it for a regional broadcaster with Margit Carstensen as a Nora so self-possessed from the outset that one German film lexicon complained she had no awakening left to play.

In which German port near the Danish border did the 'happy ending' version first reach the stage in 1880?

Flensburg. Ibsen had sent the ending to his German agent for emergencies only; when the altered play reached Berlin that autumn, protests in the theatre pushed the company back to the original.

In A Doll's House, what had made Torvald so ill that the doctors ordered him south?

Overwork. Torvald left his ministry job when they married and took on all the extra work he could find in their first year, toiling early and late until he fell gravely ill.

Which Polish-born star played Nora in an 1883 American staging of A Doll's House with a happy ending?

Helena Modjeska. A leading actress in Warsaw, she had emigrated in 1876 to run a California ranch; when it failed she returned to the stage, in English, within a year.

Which American playwright adapted A Doll's House for Ruth Gordon's 1937 Broadway run?

Thornton Wilder. He made the version while writing Our Town, and its producer, Jed Harris, opened that play a few weeks into the Ibsen run.

What does Nora teasingly show Dr. Rank as the light fades in Act Two of A Doll's House?

Silk stockings. They are flesh-coloured, for her party costume; she lets him look at the feet, then a little higher, and swats him on the ear with them for his cheek.

Which actress played Nora in Zinnie Harris's 2009 Donmar Warehouse adaptation of A Doll's House?

Gillian Anderson. Zinnie Harris moved the story to London in 1909 and made the husband a cabinet minister, so its tale of fraud opened in the very month of Britain's MPs' expenses scandal.

Tanika Gupta's 2019 Lyric Hammersmith version of A Doll's House moves the story to which setting?

Colonial India. Gupta set it in Calcutta in 1879, the year of the play itself: Nora becomes Niru, a young Bengali woman married to Tom, an English colonial official.

Stef Smith's Nora: A Doll's House, with three Noras in three eras, opened in which Scottish city?

Glasgow. The Citizens Theatre staged it at the city's Tramway because its own home was shut for rebuilding; its Noras live in 1918, as the first British women won the vote, in 1968 and in 2018.

Wendy Swallow's 2019 novel Searching for Nora sends Ibsen's runaway wife to a prairie homestead in which US state?

Minnesota. Swallow, a former journalist and professor, spent ten years on the novel, reading immigrant diaries to follow Nora from Christiania across the Atlantic to the prairie.

Stina Quagebeur's 2019 dance work Nora, based on A Doll's House, is set to music by which composer?

Philip Glass. Quagebeur, a dancer in the London company that staged it, set Nora's story to his Tirol Concerto, a score the Guardian's critic felt 'relentlessly implores us to feel something'.