Topic > New Theater Tradition in a Doll's House

In Ibsen's A Doll's House, the playwright takes the assumptions and viewer expectations of the theatrical format established by previous writers and uses them to shock his audience rather than lull them into 'oblivion with simple fun. Ibsen inherits these assumptions and expectations from two main theatrical trends, the tragic tradition and the well-made theatrical tradition. By manipulating these two formats, he arrives at a truly innovative theatrical experience, involving not only the history of the dramatic stage but its future. The history of the tragic tradition is what determines its various influences and expectations within A Doll's. House. The "rules" of this format were established by Aristotle in his Poetics, namely the 1 - 2 punch of pity and fear: an undeserved fate paired with a similar reality. The audience watched as an uncomfortably familiar character was destroyed on stage by a cruel and undeserved twist of fate. The effect was cathartic: viewers' fears were vicariously satisfied through the tragic format, leaving audiences in a purified state in which they had witnessed but not actually participated in the fall of man. This format obviously laid the foundation for Ibsen: his characters are familiar, his fate is undeserved, and his struggle is painfully and intimately emotional and mental. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayBut although Ibsen uses the tragic tradition as a framework, his machine is completely different from classical tragedy. Pity is updated and deepened from a simple twist of fate to a moral questioning of social restrictions and predestinations: Nora and Torvald's struggles with classism and the necessary façade of European bourgeois society require the viewer to approach destiny not as an uncontrollable and inhuman external force but an animal of our own creation, a wrecker built into the machine of human civilization and social culture. Ibsen also brings this evolution to the idea of ​​fear: characters who were once real with similar dilemmas are now middle-class bourgeois who could be their neighbors. Going to the theater evolved from the vicarious experience to the reflective experience: the audience watched themselves in their living room on stage. Gender stereotypes, the male-dominated universe, and the capitalist system that governed both the worlds of work and home were not only familiar themes to Ibsen's audience, but were their themes. Nora's fluffy, doll-like appearance and Torvald's paternalistic, patriarchal, idiotic character are all slight exaggerations of the common middle-class family. Thus Ibsen took the tragic tradition and used its characteristics to modernize the dramatic stage, creating an entirely new class of theater that shocked audiences with his brutal criticism. Ibsen also used influences from the well-made theatrical tradition to transform the modern theatre. The well-crafted show produced a well-oiled theater like a machine, with a format specially designed to entertain the audience and free them for at least a few hours from the daily routine of their lives. The settings were fantastic, the jokes crude and repetitive, and the plot was often known in advance. The format of the well-crafted play contained four main features, the obligatory exposition of the first act, the climax, the denouement, and the object that moves and controls the plot. Ibsen took these rules and applied them in a way that turned them into a real mockery of themselves: the first act is almost ridiculous in its stereotypes of.