| What: A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath When: April 16 to May 10, 2025 Where: Baxter Studio, Cape Town Cast: Bianca Amato and Zane Meas Director: Barbara Rubin Set design: Greg King Costume design: Maritha Visagie Bookings: Webtickets |
I am obsessed with A Doll’s House Part 2 by Lucas Hnath which is on in Cape Town, in the Baxter Studio, April 16 to May 10, 2025. Excellent play and production. Direction is by South African born Barbara Rubin, who lives in the USA. The South African cast features Bianca Amato and Zane Meas, Charlotte Butler and Simone Neethling I saw the play at a preview and went again. I could see it again. It is a mesmerising deep dive into the ties that bind, connect and separate us in marriage and family. A wry, shrewd play, spiked with laughs. Do not miss.
A Dolls House 2 by American writer Lucas Hnath was nominated for eight Tony Awards (2017), including Best Play and won Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Play.
In writing Part 2, Lucas Hnath took off as a jump-off point, the end of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which Nora slams the door and leaves her husband and children. In Hnath’s play, Nora is back, 15 years later, slamming the door as she returns to sort out unfinished business with her husband Torvald. What does it mean that Nora left and what does it mean for her to return, muses Hnath in a YouTube interview with Charlie Rose https://charlierose.com/videos/30558#Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House was set around 1879 and Part 2 takes place 15 years later, so the setting is still 19th century and this evidenced by the striking design (Greg King) with 19th century stiff backed, wooden chairs, upholstered; tight. This is 19th century opulence stripped down to hard edged minimalism as the protagonists face off in a game of musical chairs, propping themselves up, slumping on the chairs, hoisting themselves on and off. They are seated, ordered as in controlled, until they are not. The action could be set anywhere and the dialogue rings out with a contemporary zing. King announces each scene with a strip of neon lighting, which undercuts the Victorian aesthetic, bringing the play into our orbit,
Bianca Amato and Zane Meas, Charlotte Butler and Simone Neethling overlay an international accent (I cannot place it) with inflections of South African pronunciation. Integral to this production is the stuff that cannot be conveyed through words/language. The production is invigorated by a delicious vocabulary of gesture – grimaces, eye rolls, shrugs, withering looks by the women Nora (Bianca Amato), Anne Marie (Charlotte Butler) – the housekeeper/nurse maid surrogate mother of the household and Emmy – daughter of Nora and Torvald . Butler as Anne Marie cracked me up with her facial expressions. Torvald – the deserted husband (Zane Meas) – is very much in control – poker faced. Nora rebukes him: “You don’t get angry… I think you are outside [of angry], looking at it, like it is some interesting thing… you are scared … you are constipated.” The female protagonists look constipated, stuffed into their stiff 19th century skirts (costume design by Maritha Visagie). They look like they are about to burst.
On one level, A Doll’s House Part 2 presents a continuum of Ibsen’s gender critique in A Doll’s House. Women in Victorian society and marriage in particular, struggled to have a voice, an identity and transcend patriarchy social constraints and laws. Legalities aside, in Part 2, Hnath’s Nora quips that men frequently leave their families and that their desertion doesn’t meet with the scorn and derision that occurs when women leave. This still holds, just saying. Hnath’s Nora is amused that Anne Marie is surprised that she (Nora) has done well, has prospered and is not a victim. She is not conforming to the construct of the Bad/Fallen Woman who will now be punished for her sins, which is what Anne Marie clearly expects.
Hnath says that at the nub for him (I am paraphrasing) is the fact that two people (Nora and Torvald) are not capable of communicating, of talking. They skirt around each other, avoiding the real issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkDy9qs1Y1o In A Doll’s House Part 2 – they have it out. Refer back to my quote of Nora accusing Torvald of not being able to show anger.
What I find fascinating about the play is how Nora and Torvald’s marital story, a so-called war of the sexes becomes a family story. In a key scene between Nora (Amato) and her daughter Emmy (Neethling), tussle over love and marriage. Emmy is engaged about to be married. The accusations fly. Nora contends that “love is different to marriage”. Emmy (Neethling) retorts: “… I know nothing about what a marriage looks like because you left. But I do know what the absence looks like.” Amato and Neethling are dynamite in this scene – the sagacious Nora who thinks that she has everything waxed, grilled by her grown up daughter, who like her mother refuses to play the role of a victim. Narrative spoiler: Emmy reckons that she did well, in the wake of her mom’s leaving the nest. It taught her to be responsible, to have agency.
Marriage is complicated. Family is complicated. Relationships are complicated. Nora is very complicated. Time has not made her compliant. She has not returned because she is sorry or because she wants to rekindle a relationship with her children. She is fractious, demanding, unyielding and Hnath builds on her formidable resolve, dramatically in the play, making us hold our breath to see what happens.
If you are wondering how it ends with Nora and Torvald, well, you are going to have to watch the play and wait for the utterly transfixing final scene with a intriguing plot line, with shades of a courtroom thriller. It is extraordinary to see thespian veterans Meas and Amato on stage together as they rummage through the rubble of Nora and Torvald’s marriage – ferreting out anger, regret, recriminations and nuggets of tenderness. Rubin as director, masterfully brings them to a climax, from dodging around each other in the game of musical chairs, to the final countdown. At the end of it? We all want to connect with each other- really connect – despite our fears. It is not always easy to fathom choices made by individuals in order to be free, to recover their identity.
✳ Bianca Amato and Zane Meas in A Doll’s House, Part 2 by Lucas Hnath , Baxter Studio, Cape Town, April 16 to May 10, 2025. Pic: Brett Rubin. Supplied.
