David Lan: Why does A Doll’s House resonate now?
Carrie Cracknell: Nora’s story is uniquely placed to explore the intricacies of marriage—the way in which people play roles with each other, the way in which men and women lie to each other, and the sort of multi-faceted, multi-layered construction that a marriage can become over a lifetime. This opens out a series of questions about progress, specifically in relation to gender politics, and about how far we think women have come. For me as a director, it provokes a series of questions about whether we’ve come as far as we like to think we have.
DL: How far do we like to think we’ve come?
CC: A great number of women in this country believe that there is no longer a need for feminism because it feels as though as Western, educated, liberated women, they are able to have everything they want, everything they need. But in fact in many areas we are actually moving away from an equality in gender politics, towards a world in which women are more sexualized than they’ve ever been. The idea of the woman as a person who is perceived through how she looks, whose power is related to how she looks, is more prevalent than it’s ever been—and that’s at the heart of Ibsen’s play and Nora’s entrapment.
