How Henrik Ibsen Informs and

Engages his Audience in A Doll’s

House, Compared with Tom
Stoppard’s Arcadia.
According to Stuart Spencer, theatre is “anything performed by live humans...in front
of a live audience” (2002: 3), which means that theatre’s key task is to entertain and
hold the attention of said live audience. In a mostly quiet, normally quite dark and
warm room, it can be a difficult task. I will be analysing and exploring how two very
different plays do this. One is A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, a play about a “social
problem” (Spencer, 2002: 152). The other is Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, a much more
modern play attempting to “illuminate and humanise a scientific theory (Spencer,
2002: 153). Comparing these two plays, very different in topic, will uncover ways that
do and do not to engage audience and any similarities between the ones that do.

A Doll’s House is a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1879. It is the story of Nora
Helmer, the wife of a banker about to be promoted to head of a bank, Torvald. She is
being extorted by a man she got a fraudulent loan from in order to save her
husband’s life. He threatens to reveal her crime to her husband unless she
convinces Torvald to not fire him from his bank job. Over the play, Nora tries to
convince Torvald to do that while trying to keep the loan a secret. At the end of the
play, Torvald reads the letter sent by the blackmailer and rages at Nora for her act.
When the blackmailer also returns the bond he was using for blackmail, Torvald
forgives Nora and says her “womanly helplessness” only makes him love her more
(Ibsen, 1879: 61). Shocked by his outburst and realising that she never knew her
husband, Nora decides to leave. Torvald begs her not to, but she goes through with
it, leaving him and their three children behind.

When the play was first shown in Denmark in 1879, it was called “fiercely
scandalous” and some critics said it would pose a risk to family values and possibly
destroy families (Doskey, 2019). In the German production of the play, Ibsen even
had to rewrite the ending as actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to act in it as it
was (Gunderson, 2020). However, A Doll’s House is now seen as a very important
play. Actress Whitney Morse, who played Nora in the Theatre Tierra Del Sol
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production of the play called it a “watershed moment for theatre” as Nora is one of
the first realistically written women (“A Doll’s House”: Interview with Whitney Morse,
2019).

Arcadia, on the other hand, is a play written by Tom Stoppard in 1993. It

follows two sets of characters: Thomasina Coverly and her tutor, Septimus Hodge, in
1809 and 1812, and scholars Hannah Jarvis and Bernard Nightingale in modern day,
1993 in the original production. The two timelines are shown in near alternating
scenes, the 1809 scenes focussing on Thomasina’s mathematical theories and
Septimus’ many run ins with an angry poet. The 1993 scenes focus on the two
scholars researching a mysterious hermit and Lord Byron respectively. The play
ends with Hannah Jarvis discovering Septimus became the hermit after Thomasina’s
death in a fire while Thomasina and Septimus waltz together on the night of her
death.

The play is considered a masterpiece by some and incredibly boring by

others. Johann Hari called it “the greatest love story on the British stage” (2013)
while Quentin Letts called it “punishing” (2015) on account of all the mathematics
involved.

In A Doll’s House, a single set is used. The entire place takes place in the
Helmer’s living room. The play is set over three distinct days, so Ibsen represents
this by changing small details of the set. There is a large description of the set at the
beginning of act one, so only the changes are described at the beginning of acts two
and three such as “THE Christmas Tree is in the corner by the piano” (Ibsen, 1879:
29) and “The table has been placed in the middle of the room” (Ibsen, 1879: 49).

Ibsen’s use of stage and setting in this way helps immersion for the audience
as the changing of the scenery can create breaks in the action that remind the
audience they’re watching a play and break their suspension of disbelief. Keeping
the set mostly the same throughout all acts minimises the time needed to change
them between acts.

He also uses them to illustrate the passage of time with the small changes
that are made. Especially as the Christmas Tree has “burnt-down candle-ends”
(Ibsen, 1879: 29), it makes the passage of time clear without having to use dialogue
that may sound non-naturalistic to explain it. This also helps to maintain the

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audience’s immersion as they’re not drawn out of the play by confusion at when an
act is taking place or by bad writing.

Stoppard uses a similar technique in Arcadia but to very different ends.

Throughout the entire play in Arcadia, a table stays on the stage. Any prop placed on
the table, whether it be from the 1800s or the 1990s, stays there unless specifically
specified otherwise. This creates an anachronistic image of laptops in 1809 and
quills in 1993 as the story is told non-chronologically.

While this also prevents the need to change the set, as most props that are
changed between scenes are easily carried on by the actors such as “a sheet of
drawing paper” (Stoppard, 1993: 58), it doesn’t help preserve audience immersion as
the anachronistic placement of the props draws attention to the fact that the play is
not real. The audience is not supposed to believe that there is a laptop in 1809.

Stoppard did this to blur the lines between the time periods and emphasize
the play’s themes of disorder and inevitability. It’s the same reason that, especially in
the last scene when characters from both time periods are on stage at the same
time, those characters’ actions mirror each other.

Ibsen and Stoppard use the same technique for nearly opposite purposes:
Ibsen to preserve audience immersion and Stoppard to test it. However, they both
also use it to emphasize the themes of their plays. The unchanging set in A Doll’s
House can be seen to represent part of the life stifling Nora, the same place over
and over, with nothing outside it. The study room table in Arcadia gaining more and
more anachronistic items represents the “disorder out of disorder back into disorder”
(Stoppard, 1993: 8) Arcadia represents and argues against.

Using the setting to enhance themes and draw attention to the meaning of the
play is a simple technique that I have overlooked in the past. A single set can make
the play easier to watch as there aren’t lengthy set changes between scenes that
can distract audiences but care has to be taken to not confuse the audience if there
are still multiple settings or jumps in time. It also makes any changes to the set stand
out more and therefore more significant. Playing with setting, whether it’s changes,
lack of changes, or how characters interact with it, could be a way to convey themes
of my play to the audience.

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 Another way Ibsen easily conveys things to the audience is through the
character dialogue. Though they don’t speak unnaturally, conversations between
characters convey a lot through the way they treat one another and the words they
use.

One of the most obvious examples in A Doll’s House is how Torvald Helmer
sees his wife, the main character Nora. Throughout the first act, Nora is presented
as a selfish but caring and quite ditzy character. However, the more important pieces
of dialogue are Torvald’s pet names for Nora. He consistently calls her “little squirrel”
and “little skylark” (Ibsen, 1879: 5), both animals seen as busy and inconsistent. The
skylark in particular is a songbird, which if domesticated would be kept in a cage,
much like A Doll’s House posited that nineteenth century women were. Perhaps
most telling is Torvald calling her “poor little girl” (Ibsen, 1879: 8). The repetition of
“little” and the use of the word “girl” in particular highlights that Torvald does not see
Nora as an equal person but as a thing to be coddled and looked after. This also
becomes clear in his dialogue after he forgives Nora for the illegal bond.

“Only you had not sufficient knowledge to judge of the means you
used. But do you supposed you are any less dear to me, because
you don’t understand how to act on your own responsibility? No, no;
only lean on me; I will advise you and direct you. I would not be a
man if this womanly helplessness did not just give you double
attractiveness in my eyes.” (Ibsen, 1879: 61)

Torvald’s dialogue near the end makes it clear that not only does he see Nora as a
subordinate who can’t think for herself, but that he thinks this is just how women are.
It’s explicitly stated but early in the play, the seeds of it are sown and, in the end, this
is part of the reason Nora leaves.

By setting it up so early and making it so explicitly clear as it becomes a more

important factor, Ibsen ensures that the audience understands not only Torvald’s
views, but how they affect Nora and makes sure it’s ingrained in the audience’s
understanding by the end. He ensures that her final actions are understandable and
why Torvald is so opposed to them.

Stoppard uses dialogue to a similar effect in Arcadia, though in more of a

subtle way as his characters have more subtle personalities. For example, Septimus
4
Hodge telling thirteen-year-old Thomasina that carnal embrace consists of “throwing
ones arms around a side of beef” (Stoppard, 1993: 4) shows that he wishes to shield
her innocence, whether because he believes its right or because it’s what his
employers want of him. However, he is also shown to respect Thomasina by
confirming what a carnal embrace actually is when, later, Thomasina correctly
guesses.

While Stoppard successfully conveys character through his dialogue, the

necessary understanding of mathematics to engage with the themes of the play is
conveyed less effectively. For example, he has a mathematician character describe
iterated graphs as “Each graph is a section of the last one, blown up” (Stoppard,
1993: 59). Then the character has three more paragraphs explaining what iteration
is. When another character asks if the explanation is what the graphs show, the
mathematician answers “No. Not exactly. Not at all.” (Stoppard, 1993: 60).

By having long winded and ultimately unnecessary explanations of topics,

theorems, and equations that the audience may be unfamiliar with, Stoppard only
succeeds in confusing his audience. Even as someone familiar with iteration and
iterative graphs, the first two explanations the character gave only confused me. By
making something so central to the understanding of the play so difficult to
understand, Stoppard makes the themes of Arcadia difficult to understand in a way
the Ibsen didn’t with his mistreatment and underestimation of Nora. Fortunately for
the play, once characters stop trying to explain mathematics and move onto poetry
and philosophy, it gets much easier to understand with “We can’t even predict the
next drip from a dripping tap…the smallest variation blows prediction apart”
(Stoppard, 1993: 64). This allows for at least partial understanding of what the
characters are trying to impart.

While not all plays can be about easier to understand things like failing
marriages, choosing a difficult subject to base a play around, like Newtonian laws
and entropy, require a way to convey these ideas to the audience in a way that is
clear and memorable, the same way a playwright would convey characterisation
through dialogue. If handled clumsily, what could be a clever play becomes
confusing and “punishing” (Letts, 2015). At the same time, it may be best to minimise

5
technical explanations altogether as the more impassioned speech in Arcadia gets
across the importance of iteration more than the explanations of the graphs did.

Overall, both Ibsen and Stoppard engage and inform their audience quite
effectively. This is managed through easy relaying of information, easy to understand
characters, and maintaining audience immersion through set design and lack of
change. Stoppard fails in a way Ibsen doesn’t when he tries to convey complex
mathematics to his audience, which results in confusion and a break in audience
immersion and, according to some, enjoyment. This is not an indicator that complex
ideas shouldn’t be included in plays but that care should be taken to make them
understandable in order to retain audience attention and immersion.

With the way that both plays have similar ways of conveying information and
the way they use set, it implies a “correct” or at least recognised effective way to
maintain audience immersion. It provides a very clear guide on how to do so in my
own work and has also helped develop ideas of how to work within these techniques.

Word count: 2165

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Bibliography
Books
Ball, D., 1998. Backwards And Forwards. 2nd ed. Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, pp.10-12, 19-20.
Ibsen, H., 1879. A Doll's House. 1879 ed. New York: Global Classics, pp.5, 8, 29, 49,
61.
Spencer, S., 2002. The Playwright's Guidebook. 1st ed. Croydon: Penguin Books of
Canada Limited, pp.3, 152-153.
Stoppard, T., 1993. Arcadia. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber Limited, pp.4, 8, 58,
60, 64.
Websites
Doskey, E., 2019. A Doll's House Controversy. [online] [Link].
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Gundersen, M., 2020. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House - Life In Norway. [online] Life in
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[Accessed 16 December 2020].
Hari, J., 2013. Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia The Greatest Play Of Our Age?. [online]
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entertainment/theatre-dance/features/tom-stoppard-s-arcadia-greatest-play-our-age-
[Link]> [Accessed 16 December 2020].
Letts, Q., 2015. Arcadia Review: Stoppard's Swots Are Too Clever By Half. [online]
Mail Online. Available at: <[Link]
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December 2020].
Mambrol, N., 2020. Analysis Of Henrik Ibsen’S A Doll’S House. [online] Literary
Theory and Criticism. Available at: <[Link]
henrik-ibsens-a-dolls-house/> [Accessed 16 December 2020].
Videos
The Villages Florida (2019) "A Doll's House": An Interview with Whitney Morse. 8th
February, Available at: <[Link] [Accessed
16th December 2020]