A Doll’s House, Part 2: Not a sequel, a play with questions about gender equality that affect us all

The secret sauce of Hnath’s A Doll's House is cerebral inquiry. (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

28 Apr 2025

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora went off to find her freedom, slamming the door behind her. In A Doll’s House, Part 2, she returns to the same door, and must knock to be admitted. Lucas Hnath’s play is not a sequel, however, but a slick, sharp, intellectually breezy reminder that the struggle for hard-won freedoms is never over.

Forget sequels, never mind season after season of TV shows designed to hold us captive, keep us bingeing. The bait in Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 is neither the familiarity of characters we love or love to hate, nor that secret addiction we have to melodramatic twists and turns.

What makes it a riveting watch has nothing to do with the usual fodder that makes us mentally salivate as we get our nightly fix of entertainment-on-repeat.

Hnath’s secret sauce is cerebral inquiry.

Rather than a complex plot or potential cliffhanger, there’s instead a kind of cruel intellectual debate built into Hnath’s play which is now showing at the Baxter in Cape Town, almost a decade after it was first staged on Broadway where it earned a Tony nomination for Best Play.

It’s cruelty that comes with the territory when there’s narrative built around ideas rather than events, where the audience must play silent witness to the debates and arguments, logical reasoning and occasional lapses of judgement perpetrated by characters whose purpose is essentially to mess with our minds, torture us with ideas, demand that we think.

And, having forced us to listen, Hnath’s play sends us out into the world still struggling with its perplexities.

Even without knowing Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, written in 1879, this is a compelling snapshot of the afterlife of one of realist theatre’s most enduring female protagonists. In it, Hnath essentially imagines what might have happened once Nora walked out of her home, leaving her three children and husband Torvald behind, at the conclusion of Ibsen’s play.

And then it shows us what transpires when Nora returns to that house, this time with a problem she believes only Torvald can fix.

For Nora, played here by a strikingly statuesque Bianca Amato as someone who is quick-witted, bright-eyed and determined to follow her beliefs, 15 years of husbandless independence has made her strong, given her tremendous vitality.

Zane Meas as Torvald. (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Charlotte Butler and Bianca Amato in a scene from A Doll's House, Part 2. (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

The secret sauce of Hnath’s A Doll's House is cerebral inquiry. (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Amato gives Nora a kind of fierceness, an above-it-all feistiness that comes across as calm dignity — not to mention certainty that she possesses the moral upper hand, that by living according to her convictions, she has done right by herself and the world. At first it seems she’s had a magic-carpet ride, led the life of an artistic intellectual who has found a way to spread her feminist gospel and been able to use creative licence to express her mind and in some cases even destroy the institution of marriage she so abhors.

She has had lovers, too, has sampled all kinds of men.

Torvald, meanwhile, has barely had a love life.

Nora reports that she’s generally enjoyed great personal freedom, that she’s attained that thing that so eluded her while living under Torvald’s roof.

But this cool level-headedness begins to fray and splinter to some extent as the realities of the world she’s left behind steadily reveal themselves and frictions arise out of the tinder and kindling of unavoidable hurt her choices have caused.

It’s not long after Nora’s return that she starts to hear about the consequences of her actions, learns what the people who once loved her think of her behaviour and her choices. What for her has been liberation, has meant something radically different for those left behind. It turns out that Nora’s truth is a lot more complex and complicated than at first assumed.

Her boldness and her willingness to act have also earned her powerful enemies, made her a target for treachery. And, since this is a drama, there are plenty of twists and turns and many more unexpected outcomes than she might have predicted.

For one thing, there’s the fact that by leaving her family behind, the nanny (played with a combination of subtle wisdom and endearingly kooky energy by Charlotte Butler) who had once raised her has pretty much had to abandon her own child in order to be a mother to Nora’s three privileged children.

Those children are now adults, and it turns out that at least one of them — Nora’s daughter Emmy — is a bit of a firecracker just like her mom.

Emmy’s state of suppressed fury in fact gives rise to what is perhaps this production’s most interesting performance. Simone Neethling plays the tight-lipped bright spark as shrewd and hardened and bitter at being abandoned. She is in many ways her mother’s daughter: a quietly clever match for Nora’s aura of aloof superiority. Whip-sharp and prepared to play dirty, Emmy dons a porcelain-faced sternness that’s astonishing to watch. And when her mask does in fact slip, it produces one of the play’s most poignant moments: Emmy tells Nora that it’s because she has grown up without the presence of lovingly married parents that her deepest desire is to be married so that she can experience the thing she’s never known.

That revelation hits hard. For Nora, it’s surely a punch to the gut.

If Emmy and Nora play it tough, Zane Meas as the slightly pitiable Torvald gives in to his character’s softer, more vulnerable side. He shows a haplessness and emotional range that turns him not merely into a victim of life’s unpredictable consequences, but also makes him somewhat emotionally stunted. There’s a scene in which Torvald rips up a hard-won legal document and then, still at a loss over what to do with his emotions, savagely shoves the scraps of paper into his mouth, attempts to devour them as he momentarily loses himself to some base instinct.

In some ways, it’s these moments of unbridled animal-like behaviour that the audience craves — we want to see all that pent-up anger and rage lift the lid off the proverbial pot. Hnath’s trick to a large extent is keep the lid on fairly tightly, to let the conversations unfold at a civilised lick, maintain a degree of civility and decorum. Yes, there’s some swearing, voices are definitely raised and nostrils do flare, but in the only scene that genuinely threatens to spill into physical violence, the rage and anger instead transform into mutual laughter.

It’s maddening, but isn’t life like that?

The sustained control has much to do with Barbara Rubin’s tempered direction. There’s a naturalism, but there’s also an edge to it, a sense that just beneath the surface these characters are teasing out arguments that have raged back and forth throughout eternity.

This isn’t a sequel to Ibsen’s original, it’s an appeal to keep the debate alive, to never forget that women’s rights had to be fought for — and that, while to some extent they have been won, they are not necessarily set in concrete.

While Hnath’s play captures the socio-political realities of the late 1800s, its language is very much of our time. And the freshness of the dialogue is a reminder that the liberties we assume to be commonplace were once considered pure fantasy.

Nora, in fact, makes a prediction about the institution of marriage that even today seems an unlikely eventuality. And never mind the emergence of pro-natalism and the upsurge in so-called family values in the US, we are — right now — witnessing politically motivated events that threaten to undermine some of the rights Nora Helmer believed were worth fighting for. DM

A Doll’s House, Part 2 is at the Baxter Studio until 10 May.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

South Africa