A
Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, The Circle by Somerset Maughan and Blithe Spirit
by Noel Coward.
NB Marlborough Summer School will be providing
copies of all three texts.
The
following blurb deliberately does not contain any spoilers.
Three
very different plays that examine the controversial theme of women responding
to female repression in male dominated societies. If this sounds rather heavy
or too polemical I can promise the plays are not only thought provoking, tragic
in part, but also often comedic.
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 Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been
published earlier that month. The play is set in a Norwegian town circa 1879.
The
play concerns the fate of a married woman, who at the time in Norway lacked
reasonable opportunities for self-fulfilment in a male-dominated world, even
though Ibsen denied it was his intent to write a feminist play. It was a great
sensation at the time and caused a "storm of outraged controversy"
that went beyond the theatre to the world of newspapers and society. One of the
play's critics, James Huneker noted of the original ending that it
"reverberated across the roof of the world." Consequently, it is not only
considered by some as the greatest play since Shakespeare, but also the most
performed outside of his plays.
The
Circlea Comedy in Three Acts is a play by W. Somerset Maugham. It was first produced
at the Haymarket Theatre, London on 3 March 1921, and has been revived several
times in the West End and on Broadway. The play, which caused some outrage among
a small minority of playgoers at the time of the premiere, takes place over a
single day at Aston-Adey, Arnold Champion-Cheney's country house in Dorset.
The
Circle was "the first of Maugham's plays to be booed". As The Times
put it, "It is, of course, a bold ending - too bold, apparently, for some
orthodox moralists in the gallery last night - but approved, we think, by the
more mundane majority in the house
The
writer Robert Bechtold describes the play as a comedy of manners - "a
rewrite of Lady Windermere's Fan a quarter of a century later in a post World
War I atmosphere." The critic of The Times took a different view: The
"bold" ending is surely frivolity's rather wistful salute to
sincerity.
Blithe
Spiritis a comic play by Noël Coward, described by the author as "an improbable
farce in three acts". The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles
Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant Madame Arcati to
his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book.
The
play was first seen in the West End in 1941 and ran for 1,997 performances, a
new record for a non-musical play in London. It also did well on Broadway later
that year, running for 657 performances. The play was adapted for the cinema in
1945; a second film version followed in 2020. Coward directed a musical
adaptation, High Spirits, seen on Broadway and in the West End in 1964.
Radio and television presentations of the play have been broadcast in Britain
and the US from 1944 onwards. It continues to be revived in the West End, on
Broadway and elsewhere.
