Extract

I have been performing tricks for you, Torvald.

A wife dances the tarantella for her husband, spinning faster and faster, and beneath the performance a secret debt is tearing her life apart. Henrik Ibsen premiered this play in Copenhagen in 1879, and the sound of the door slamming in the final scene echoed across every stage in Europe. Nora Helmer has forged a signature to save her husband's life. When the truth emerges, she discovers that the man she married sees her not as a partner but as a charming possession. Ibsen stripped the drawing room of its comforts and made domestic life a theatre of moral crisis. The play does not argue for women's rights. It simply shows one woman waking up inside a marriage and choosing, with terrifying calm, to walk out into the night alone.