A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen: Literary vs Playwriting Lens

This week we were assigned a playwriting analysis assignment! I choose to dive into A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. I had taken a very fast-paced English class in the spring semester where we read plays. The professor had told us that she would teach ten plays over four months in a regular semester, but we were going to be reading seven plays in two months! As a result of the time constraints, we had little opportunity to dive into the plays fully. We briefly looked at A Doll’s House in this class, but I wanted to look at it more in-depth.

The first thing that struck me was the different experience I had looking at the play through a literary versus playwriting lens. In my English class about drama, we looked at A Doll’s House in terms of the story and the use of language, but according to Aristotle, language is the fourth most important part of the theatre. As I was in the English class, this was something that I did not even think of. We concerned ourselves with the meaning behind the story, more than analyzing the piece’s structure and characters.

Looking through the theatre lens, I feel I could take more from the play than I did in the English class. I had to think more about how the structure impacted the story and the storytelling process rather than just thinking about the story itself. When thinking of the characters and their archetypes, I was able to see how their motivations are explained, rather than just reading them as is. Thinking about the word choice and types of speech allowed me to find more meaning in the play than I had before. Overall, I felt that I had taken much more meaning when reading A Doll’s House with this lens than I had before.