ABSTRACT

This paper discusses two Canadian productions of A Doll’s House-Charles McFarland’s (Vancouver, 1987) and Peter Hinton’s (Montreal, 2006)—in the context of the global tendency to adjust Ibsen’s ending by updated or shocking innovations. Is there a distinctively “Canadian” approach, different from the modern European or the nineteenth-century Scandinavian sensibility? How do Canadian directors “transcreate” Ibsen’s text from a national to an international specifi city, from the cultural context of Norway to the cultural context of a multi-cultural Canada? The paper investigates the global challenge of how to reconcile modern Canadian and international values with Ibsen’s time-specifi c and national theme.