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A workshop looking at the new translations of Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s House and When We Dead Awaken and Laura Kieler’s play Men of Honour, to be published by OUP in their Worlds Classics series in November 2025. Laura Kieler, the model for Nora in A Doll’s House, had a complex, ongoing interaction with Ibsen, conducted across several decades and, most intriguingly, through these three plays in which they speak to one another.
With excerpts from the plays and other relevant texts voiced by professional actors, the workshop will look at Laura Kieler’s life, literary and sociopolitical works, her role in the provenance of Ibsen’s international fame, her response to his use of her ‘life’, here translated into English for the first time, and Ibsen’s subsequent justification of the (male) artist’s exploitation of lives and bodies.
Context is all, and context makes for relevance. Laura Kieler’s voice is central to an understanding of Ibsen – and of her times and our times.
The workshop will be led by the Kieler and Ibsen scholars Kirsten Shepherd and Tzen Sam, and by the translator Gaye Kynoch.
This workshop is supported by the Performance Research Hub and OCCT.
