A DOLL HOUSE, MISSING!
...puts a mask over the truth so that he can live with it.' Ibsen wanted to remove this mask. In this play, the audience could see a woman who claims that she happily married but deep inside she knows it is not true and she begins to realize it. It is so, a search for truth from the author. Besides, to be as close as possible to the truth, Ibsen used a language totally new for drama at that time: he chose prose instead of verse. But for him, it remains poetry, because poetry is a search for truth. He expressed this idea in a response to a critic: 'But your plays are not poetic, Mr Ibsen.' Ibsen said, 'Then you will have to alter your idea of poetry. It is the search for truth ' it does not have to rhyme. If it has this search, then it is poetry.' Following him, the common language reflects realism. Thus, Ibsen broke with the tradition of drama in the choice of his audience: the middle class, in the choice of the topic: attacks on middle class institutions (in order to shock with the truth) and in the choice of the language: middle class common language. Moreover, this replacement of verse by prose will have a great impact on the development of drama. Besides, another telling argument in support of the idea that Ibsen was a revolutionary writer is his characters' choice and nature, especially Nora's in A Doll's House. At the end of the play, the way she acts shows that she refuses to conform to convention, she refuses to be her husband's doll but she wants to assert her independency. However she is a woman and following the middle class society at that time: 'immediately marriage becomes a microcosm of the prevailing male-dominated society at large, in which ' as the preliminary notes to A Doll's House put it ' A woman cannot be herself... It is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.' So, by her final reaction: slamming the door and leaving her family, she knows that she refuses to accept a society where a woman is a doll, where a woman has no more rights than a child. So, Ibsen's characters are not special people -- actually, they resemble the audience he wanted to touch. And the way the characters speak, added to this resemblance leads to identification from the public with the characters. This was a new relationship between theatre and its audience. Besides, his characters are not all bad or good. There are no hero, no villain. Ibsen said: 'In the good there is bad, and in the bad there is good.' Actually, it was the first time that characters talked about themselves, reveal their inside doubts. By this way, he tried to force the spectators to see life as more complex than they might think. And, in this view too, He was a pioneer. Besides, this also had an impact on the actors, indeed it represented a challenge because it was the first time they had to be on their character's side, nor a villain representing evil, neither a hero representing good but just a human being with both sides. 'Ibsen never says which character is wrong or right.' This aspect represented a huge advance in theatre. But his real aim was the spectator to 'think and discuss and ' from the discussion ' to learn who he really is.' Indeed thanks to identification, Ibsen's plays become 'not about a single person with a problem. They [Ibsen's plays] are about all the people who have that problem.' So, the spectators can feel themselves involved in the play, and they could so question themselves about how they would have acted in the character's place. So the spectator has to forge his own opinion about a character, in Nora's case for example: does he think it is finally a rather convenient situation for her to play the doll? Or is he ready to admit that she is just a victim of a patriarchal society, and therefore, that she has to pl...