Nora oder Ein Puppenhaus [A Doll’s House]

Nora, with her sweet tooth. Nora, the squirrel. Nora, the doll in the doll’s house. The sexualized wish-fulfilment dreams of a bigoted world of men explode in Herbert Fritsch’s production into a gaudy nightmare, which makes previous incarnations of Ibsen’s classic emancipation piece seem rather old and uptight. As a giggling princess of a prima ballerina with a shock of carrot red hair the confident and sexy Oberhausen Lulu hops through a Nosferatu-like selection of blood-sucking lechers, cynics and other examples of frustrated manhood. If anyone is deserving of the much quoted label ‘post-feminist’ then it is Fritsch and his leading actress Manja Kuhl. Here a well known psychological drama is spanned across a ghost train aesthetic with merciless thoroughness: it’s horrifying, fun and wickedly bitter. A ‘Nora’ seen in the glittering light of marriage hell, a perfectly choreographed bourgeois farce of largely lifeless automatons who insist on claiming to be human.

Vasco Boenisch