Erik Østerud seeks to interpret A Doll House by applying a number of grids to it (2).The first grid is his own idea that the form of the twelve dramas of contemporary life is that of a “double drama,” in which a “sacred drama, a drama of allegory, myth and ritual ceremony” is contained within an “avant-garde drama,” which dramatizes “the constitutive elements of the idea of modernity” and makes them into “cornerstones  of a  revolutionary ethos.”
               The    other   grids    he   applies    are
“masquerade” (because of the role-playing and other kinds of theatricality in the play), the “aesthetic erotic theatre work” (exemplified by certain sections of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Lady Hamilton’s shawl dances), “carnival and fast or the wheel of fortune,” life as a contrast between happiness and unhappiness, an idea of what “the wonderful” means, and an idea of what the tarantella dance signifies.  There is some basis for associating some if not all of these grids with the play, but the application of them in this essay frequently blurs the specificities of the play.  Instead of shedding light on it, the grids flood it with light, with the result that their light is about all that can be seen.  I also find it hard to accept Østerud’s extreme reading of the final episode, in which, he states, “Nora is close to being reduced to a mere mouthpiece of opinions—Ibsen’s opinions, that is. She becomes more of a voice and a line of argument than a human being.”
           Kamilla Aslaksen focuses on A Doll House in her discussion of Ibsen and melodrama (3), and her excellent reading of the play is well worth consulting, especially for its considerations of Nora’s conception of her having saved Torvald and of Nora’s multiple roles in contrast to Torvald’s more limited repertoire.  But this reading is subordinate to and illustrative of her larger purpose, which is to “suggest some other ways of approaching” the melodramatic features in Ibsen’s dramas of contemporary life “than the view commonly held by Ibsen scholars that, aesthetically speaking,” they “must be seen as anomalies or essentially regressive elements.”  Her ideas about melodrama derive from Peter Brooks’ important 1976 work, The Melodramatic Imagination, in which melodrama is seen as a mode of signifying that provided a substitute for the “Traditional Sacred” lost in the desacralization of human life; melodrama provided “a secular system of ethics and a means of investing individual everyday lives with significance and justification.”  According to Aslaksen, melodrama has a typical epistemological process, “a process of creating a world beyond the reality which realism pretends to represent and explain, and she argues that “it is the tension between the realism and the melodramatic that creates much of the dramaturgical excitement”  in A Doll House.  “On one hand the utopian and futuristic tendency [realism],on the other the lamentation over and

the search for something lost [melodrama]: It is in the never ending alternation between the two poles that the play’s “appeal to the modern reader/audience is to be found.”  I find some slippage in her terms when she is trying to equate melodrama with Romanticism, melodrama’s deep purpose with melodrama itself, and Nora’s and Torvald’s final settling of accounts with melodrama, but this is a minor problem in an important and ground-breaking contribution to Ibsen studies.
              The two productions of Rosmersholm discussed by Keld Hyldig (4) took place in Norway’s National Theater in 1905 and 1922.  Johanne Dybwad played Rebecca in both productions and directed the second one.  In formulating his distinction between “symbolic” and “allegoric” approaches to staging Ibsen, Hyldig draws on the definitions formulated by Goethe, for whom, according to Hyldig, “symbolic significance can never be exhaustively understood and defined absolutely in abstract terms,” whereas allegoric significance involves “expressions and modes of understanding based upon abstract concepts, preconceived ideas and conventions.” Hyldig tells us that during the first three decades of the twentieth century “the main line of development of the Norwegian Ibsen style [. . .] led from exterior realism, through psychological realism toward an intimate naturalism,” while the style of acting and directing of the more innovative Dybwad “led from exterior realism, through psychological penetration toward symbolic exposé.”  It is difficult to tell exactly what Hyldig means by these terms, especially the last of them, which is the crucial one.  His best attempt to clarify his distinction between allegoric and symbolic insofar as productions are concerned involves his finding a similar distinction in the dramas of contemporary life:  “Ibsen’s contemporary plays have a realistic level representing physical circumstances, characters, milieus and socio-political questions, but step by step in the writing of these plays Ibsen undermined this realistic level with psychological subtleties and secrets.  This interior, or subtextual, dramaturgical tendency of the texts makes all exterior references, realistic, historic, or socio-political, secondary, yet necessary as a frame for the drama.”  According to Hyldig, if a production focuses on the realistic level it will be allegoric, while creating a symbolic production requires emphasizing the “interior, or subtextual, dramaturgical tendency” of the play, which he soon reduces to “the inner life of the characters.”  Hyldig provides a lot of good information on the two productions and on Norwegian theater practice.  He also manages to demonstrate his claim about the difference between the two productions to a certain extent.  But it is hard to like his description of an Ibsen play, and his account of the second production shows that what symbolic theater reveals is much more than just the inner life of the characters.