Reimagining the New Woman: Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (2019) on the London stage

Abstract

The reception of Ibsen’s plays in England has been amply documented by scholars who have focused especially on how his work resonated with feminist writers and intellectuals championing the New Woman in late Victorian Britain. It was especially the character of Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House that galvanized the activity of translators and actresses, who teased out the complexity of this character and its significance in the cultural context of fin de siècle Britain. In later epochs, the play has frequently been revived through rewritings that have gradually aligned Nora’s predicament and her quest for self-realization with the changing roles of women in society. In the 2019 rewriting of A Doll’s House by playwright Tanika Gupta, the play is relocated to Calcutta in 1879, the year A Doll’s House was written and two years after Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Nora/Niru is a Bengali middle-class woman married to an English manager, Tom Helmer. The adaptation strengthens therefore the transnational appeal of the play that early women translators into English had intended to unpack, while simultaneously providing insights into Anglo-Indian relations in imperial Britain. This article intends to focus on the strategies adopted by Gupta in her postcolonial relocation of Ibsen’s work. Gupta’s intersectional take on the woman question brings to the fore interconnected issues of race, class and gender, thus contributing to the construction of the new woman in diasporic South Asian women’s writing (Hussain 2005).