Playing it straight with A Doll House

Pan Pan’s take on Henrik Ibsen’s classic tragedy toys with its title but is otherwise true to his vision, says Pádraic Killeen

IT’S the final week of rehearsals for Pan Pan’s Henrik Ibsen adaptation, A Doll House, and director Gavin Quinn is leading the actors through final rehearsals.

Judith Roddy — playing the iconic lead Nora — has scampered downstage, and Quinn instructs her to make her movements “just a little more squirrelly”. Roddy obliges.

Eavesdropping on Pan Pan’s rehearsal is entertaining. Why wouldn’t it be? The company’s productions delight in laying bare the theatrical process. The Dublin company, headed up by Quinn and designer Aedín Cosgrave, is renowned for a series of productions — Oedipus Loves You, Playing the Dane: The Rehearsal, and All That Fall — that have torn up the parameters of theatre.

In their interpretation of Ibsen, the usual meta-theatrical flourishes and inspired quirkiness seem to be present. The cast breaks into song and there are inventive visuals. But if the rehearsals are a yardstick, Pan Pan are also playing the famous story remarkably straight.

“Every project is individual,” says Quinn, “and this project requires that the audience gets the full story.” The story is crucial because at its nub this is a play about character development. But the way we’ve done it has this cheekiness and alertness about it that makes it engaging to watch.”

A Doll’s House (as it is usually spelt) is Ibsen’s most famous play, and it’s regarded as the first great modernist prose drama. Its narrative hinges on a woman who comes to see her place in patriarchal 19th century Norway as a confinement. Her action at the play’s conclusion, leaving her husband and children behind, was considered shocking in its own era. In many respects, it remains shocking today.

“Nora is, basically, Hamlet for girls,” says Quinn. “It’s the big one. It doesn’t work unless Nora works, and the actress has to have the ability to show many faces.

“And that’s the thing about Nora’s journey. It’s not so much about her breaking up a relationship. It’s about her journey to find the self. What’s interesting is to look at that a little more closely — to look at how different people put different pressures on her and how she behaves this way with certain people and behaves a different way with others.

You do lose yourself within that. She’s a young woman with three kids, and she’s sort of trapped in this situation where, almost without her being aware of it, her true self is breaking through and causing problems.”

Unsurprisingly, given its narrative arc, the play is often cited as a canonical work by feminists. While Quinn acknowledges that Ibsen consciously wrote strong female characters, he says that Nora is representative of humanity. “I’m sticking with the idea that it’s not about a woman’s journey; it’s about a human being’s journey,” he says. “It’s much more interesting if you look at it like that. Feminists have championed this play, but Ibsen said, ‘no, it’s not a feminist play; it’s a play about people’.”

Notably, in taking on Ibsen, Pan Pan are once more investigating a classic text. What does a modern interaction with classic theatre open up to them? “A classic allows you to create a new performance text and you still have the quality of the original text to meld with your performance text,” says Quinn.

“It’s good material to make new theatre with. Whereas, sometimes, with a newer text, that might not have quite the same quality, it may not actually survive the process of rehearsal and the process of investigation.

“Ultimately, it’s a chance for audiences to see these plays in a new light,” he says. “Because they’re not done and dusted. Every generation has to decide what theatre is.”

After A Doll House, Quinn and his company will turn their attention to an adaptation of King Lear that they expect to produce in the autumn. “It’s going to be a new piece made from King Lear about King Lear,” says Quinn. “It’s really about ‘King Lear at home in his house’, you know, or someone imagining that they are King Lear.”

For Pan Pan, the un-doing and the un-dusting continues.

* A Doll House opens in Smock Alley this evening and runs until Apr 28.