Luzerner Theater
Sound design and music for Bram Jansen’s contemporary on stage encounter between the Ibsen piece and the therapeutic method known as Family Constellations.
About
There is a crisis in the dollhouse. Nora Helmer is tired of playing doll’s wife to a doll’s man and doll’s mother to her doll’s children. I no longer want to be a woman, but rather a human being. And leaves her husband and children: middle-class burnout for 138 years.
Director Bram Jansen looks at Henrik Ibsen’s work from today’s perspective and presents “What about Nora?” Piece and characters newly presented.
What’s wrong with Nora? Ibsen’s successful play, published in 1879, shook bourgeois morality as a crime thriller about psychological life and soon developed into a symbol of the emancipation of women. The story of the young wife and mother who exchanges the ideal world of her doll’s house for personal responsibility and self-realization has fascinated countless artists since then. It wasn’t entirely clear from the start whether Nora would actually be allowed to go. Ibsen himself was forced to write an alternative ending in which she stays for the sake of the children. While Nora’s departure into self-knowledge in 1879 marked a break in the era, “Know yourself” has long since become an omnipresent coaching imperative. Rigid social norms have been replaced by the call for self-realization.
In Lucerne, the young Dutch director Bram Jansen and the ensemble developed their own version of the story about Nora, her husband Torvald Helmer, his friend Dr Rank, Ms. Linde and the employee Krogstad, all of whom are declared protagonists. The historical figures move very close to us. What does the doll’s house still tell us today, about constraints and lies in life, but also about the impossible longing for a life free of contradictions?
Credits
Concept & direction: Bram Jansen
Actors: Christian Baus, Nina Langensand, Verena Lercher, Lorenz Nufer, Mirza Šakić
Dramaturgy: Julia Reichert
Scenography & costume design: Sophie Krayer
Music & sound design: Jorg Schellekens
Première
18 January 2017, Box (Luzern, CH)