Teatr Polski, Wroclaw, Poland – 2018

My adaptation of Ibsen’s play: “A DOLL’S HOUSE” transforms the psychological-realistic style of the original text into an epic form where all the actors are on stage all the time telling us the story of Nora and her revolt against the bourgeois marriage. In this way I get a chorus on stage that partly comments the action and partly reinforces the dramatic scenes.

In the cast I have added two young men, Tomasz and Andrzej, who start the performance by introducing the audience to the time when Ibsen wrote the play. They also tell us about the reactions to the play in Europe at that time 139 years ago. (At the end of the play when Nora refers to her two sons using the Norwegian names of Thomas and Andreas, we will understand that the two young men actually are “Nora’s sons” in some distant future, – their generation is a product of her revolt.) These two characters give me the possibility to comment the action and relate it to our time, and at times they are so “absorbed” by the action that they start playing Nora’s part.

I have also introduced “the cold snow” using the cold weather as a metaphor of a patriarchal intolerant society and “climate change” as a metaphor of the whole society changing. Snow is therefor the only scenography-element on the naked stage. The snow and the cold whether gets a more and more ambiguous significance during the play, which explains the title: “Acid Snow”. I have reinforced the dramatic elements of the play. Sometimes it is almost as exciting as a crime story. I have also created poetic scenes where I use the epic form to create melancholic images relevant to a marriage breaking up or unfulfilled love. My general strategy is humor, and the epic form I have chosen gives me the possibility to “play with theater conventions” in an absurd and humoristic way.