I feel like a 9 year old who just overheard their soon-to-be-divorced-parents’ final torrential fight.
Ibsen spared us that in the original. Decisive, emphatic and dignified. I would love to line up a bunch of great Nora performances and assign some adjectives to them in that final scene.
Torvald reads as hysterical, but Nora reads as calm. When she says, “I have never felt so much clearness and certainty as to-night.” that indicates to me that she has said everything with the composure she was trained to have and an added bonus of being able to say things she absolutely believes to be true. This calm is particularly striking given the low-grade hum of happy hysteria that accompanies Nora’s (particularly female) hustle as soon as she enters carrying stacks of Christmas presents in scene one, and grows and peaks with the wild dance denouement.
A calm divorce? Hm…never heard of it. A Doll’s House Part 2 makes Ibsen’s play seem like the Hollywood version. The Reese Witherspoon version! N…
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