A Doll's House

A Doll's House
Original manuscript cover page, 1879
Written by	Henrik Ibsen
Characters	Nora Torvald Helmer Krogstad Mrs. Linde Dr. Rank Children Anne-Marie Helene
Date premiered	21 December 1879 (1879-12-21)
Place premiered	Royal Danish Theatre, Copenhagen, Denmark
Original language	Norwegian, Danish
Subject	The awakening of a middle-class wife and mother
Genre	Naturalistic / realistic problem play Modern tragedy
Setting	The home of the Helmer family in an unspecified Norwegian town or city, c. 1879

A Doll's House (Danish and Bokmål: Et dukkehjem; also translated as A Doll House) is a three-act play written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month.^[1] The play is set in a Norwegian town c. 1879.

The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who, at the time in Norway, lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. Despite the fact that Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play, it was a great sensation at the time^[2] and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theater to the world of newspapers and society.^[3]

In 2006, the centennial of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most-performed play that year.^[4] UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.^[5]

The title of the play is most commonly translated as A Doll's House, though some scholars use A Doll House. John Simon says that A Doll's House is "the British term for what [Americans] call a 'dollhouse'".^[6] Egil Törnqvist says of the alternative title: "Rather than being superior to the traditional rendering, it simply sounds more idiomatic to Americans."^[7]