A Doll’s House at the Guthrie
The idea of loyalty comes up a lot these days. Who should you trust? What does it take to earn that trust? When all is lost, who can you count on to be by your side? Can you even count on yourself?
In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora Helmer is adrift; she just doesn’t know it yet. Her marriage is a sham and she is living a lie.. Eight years earlier, she took out a loan to pay for a year-long trip to Italy to save her husband, Torvald, from a terrible illness. Torvald hates the idea of debt, so Nora hides the fact that she took out this loan from him, opening herself up to future blackmail in the process. She conceals her efforts to repay the loan for years because Torvald will never understand, or so she tells herself. Nora never gives him the opportunity until her hand is forced, at which point Torvald–predictably–goes off the rails and says things he cannot possibly take back. It is at this point that Nora realizes that she and Torvald are complete strangers; they shared a house and children, but never anything deeper. Torvald treats Nora with benign, infantilizing condescension, as though she is too thoughtless and naive to do anything more than just spend his money. His expectation that she would just forget his unforgivable words highlights how little he thinks of her intelligence.
Torvald is the easy villain, who glibly tosses the line “…for richer or for poorer” when chastising Nora for her seemingly profligate spending, only to cast her aside at the mere threat of embarrassment. But Nora’s self-righteous refusal to tell Torvald the truth about the loan and her efforts to pay it back, years after he recovered, shows that she has little faith in how he will react to having been lied to for years. Maybe he would have reacted the same way, but we’ll never know. Nora’s push for independence and self-discovery are laudable, yet we do her no favors if we overlook her own agency in creating the situation.
Amelia Pedlow’s performance as Nora is masterful. DirectorTracy Bridgen takes Amy Herzog’s streamlined adaptation of the staid Victorian era play into near screwball territory, with Pedlow delivering quippy lines that would feel right at home in Oscar Wilde’s drawing room. I was confused about the choice to darken the set each time someone came through the front door of the Torvald house, as though it marked a scene change. There were no props to deliver or sets to move. While the dynamics between characters–and our access to the truth–depends greatly on who is in the room, it broke the audience’s connection to the characters and reminded us that weren’t watching real people. In the end, it hardly matters. This is another excellent Guthrie production that will get audiences thinking and talking. It certainly succeeds.
A Doll’s House is at the Guthrie theater in Minneapolis through October 12, 2025. Tickets start at $34.
Photo by Dan Norman
