ABSTRACT
A Doll's House was first performed in Copenhagen in 1879. In the next ten years there were a number of performances across Europe before it reached London in 1889. Wherever it was played it caused a sensation. The final offstage slam of the door attacked the certainty that marriage and the bond between mother and child were sacrosanct. In this chapter I want to acknowledge this radicalism but to argue that the play stands on a knife-edge: it slams the door on conventional ideas just as it contains and controls the idea of the 'new woman' in the theatre and in society more generally.
