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  • Essay / New Theatrical Tradition in a Doll's House

    In Ibsen's A Doll's House, the author takes the prerequisites and viewer expectations of the play format established by previous authors and uses them to shock his audience rather than making people forget it with simple entertainment. Ibsen inherits these conditions and expectations from two main theatrical trends, the tragic tradition and the tradition of well-made acting. By manipulating these two formats, he achieves a truly innovative theatrical experience, which involves not only the history of the dramatic stage but its future. The history of the tragic tradition is one that determines its various influences and expectations within A Doll's. Home. The “rules” of this format were stated by Aristotle in his Poetics, namely the 1-2 strike of pity and fear: an undeserved fate associated with a similar reality. Audiences saw an uncomfortably familiar character destroyed on stage by a cruel and undeserved fate. The effect was that of catharsis: spectators' fears were fulfilled vicariously through the tragic format, leaving the audience in a state of purge where they had witnessed but not actually participated in the fall of the man. This format obviously set Ibsen's framework: 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 Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay But although Ibsen uses the tragic tradition as a framework, his car is completely different from classical tragedy. Pity is updated and deepened from a simple twist of fate to a moral questioning of societal constraints and predestinations - Nora and Torvald's struggles against classism and the necessary façade of European bourgeois society demand that the viewer approaches destiny not as an uncontrollable and inhuman external force, but an animal of our own creation, a troubleshooter built into the machine of human civilization and social culture. Ibsen also brings this evolution to the idea of ​​fear: characters who were once royalty facing similar dilemmas are now middle-class bourgeois who could be our neighbors. Going to the theater moved from an indirect experience to a reflective experience: the audience watched themselves in their own living room, on stage. The gender-stereotypical, male-dominated world and the capitalist system that governed both the world of work and the home were not only themes familiar to Ibsen's audiences: they were their themes. Nora's floaty, doll-like exterior and Torvald's condescending, patriarchal, idiotic character are all slight exaggerations of the ordinary middle-class household. Thus, Ibsen took the tragic tradition and used its characteristics to modernize the dramatic stage, creating a whole new class of theater that shocked audiences with its brutal critiques. Ibsen also used influences from the tradition of well-made acting to transform modern theater. The play, well produced, produces theater oiled like a machine, with a format specially designed to entertain the audience and free them for at least a few hours from the daily grind of their lives. The settings were fantastic, the jokes crude and repetitive and the plot was often known in advance. The well-crafted play format 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 complete mockery.