References to Young Vic (2012) production (ADH)

How does YV compare to the liminal setting of GM?

1. Presents a world which is subtly destabilised

2. Rotating stage offers 360-degree view of the action, promoting a sense of realism/even naturalistic forces

How does YV compare to the troubling movement of GM, demonstrating that the seemingly stable world of the 19^th Century Norwegian patriarchy is not as stable as it might seem?

1. Audience peers into action with unsettling intensity

2. Nora’s plight made all the more shocking as we’re exposed to its full force

3. Cyclical rotating stage suggests: Nora stuck, going round and round in narrowly prescribed existence of domestic entrapment/entrapment in Victorian-era gender expectations

How is YV’s use of lighting (mimicked by the more recent Broadway show of 2023) more similar to the “morning and evening” (liminal) appearances of the goblin men?

1. Use of side lighting to create bars of light and shadow/prevailing darkness of the set, hints symbolically at the entrapping, unilluminated confines of the stifling patriarchy

2. Secretiveness/hidden motives also suggested – though Nora seeks to “Hide” – the first word of the play, might link her to the troubling goblin men who, from a Freudian perspective, represent sexual temptation/libidinous forces

3. “Angel in the house” (Coventry Patmore, 1854)

How else does the YV production of ADH link to GM?

1. Bars of entrapping light – suggesting a prison –  play over Nora as she lies on (ironically) a child’s bed/talks about using sexual allure to earn money from an imagined wealthy man

2. Calls to mind the sexual threat that such behaviour might pose to the established patriarchal order of Norwegian society in the 1870s

3. Goblins similarly seek to draw Laura (like Jeanie) into shadow world of sexual experience, to seduce/destroy the idealised Victorian notions of pure, virginal, domesticated women 

How does the YV production relate to RT?

1. Rotating stage might convey the entrapping setting of “Round Tower at Jhansi” where Captain Skene/young wife faced with seemingly impossible choice

2. They choose death, fulfilling Victorian notions of heroism/bravery (for Queen and Country) even though this proves ironically to be fiction promoted by Rossetti (kept poem in published collections despite historical fact revealing the capture and less than ‘noble’ death of the white colonials)

3. Post-colonial reading of that poem underscores troubling sense of ‘heroism’ – that the true heroes might rather be the “swarming howling wretches” i.e. the Indian rebels rising up against the oppressive British Empire