Scintillating sequel to A Doll's House asks us to think

Henrik Ibsen's freedom-loving protagonist returns to the home she left in Lucas Hnath’s play about liberation and its price. By Keith Bain

- By Keith Bain

Forget sequels, never mind TV shows designed to hold us captive. The bait in Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 is neither the familiarity of characters we love or love to hate, nor that secret addiction we have to melodramatic twists and turns.

Hnath’s secret sauce is cerebral inquiry. Rather than a complex plot or potential cliff-hanger, there’s a kind of cruel intellectual debate built into Hnath’s play at the Baxter in Cape Town, showing almost a decade after it was first staged on Broadway, where it earned a Tony nomination for Best Play.

It's cruelty that comes with the territory when there’s narrative built around ideas rather than events, where the audience must play silent witness to the debates and arguments, logical reasoning and occasional lapses of judgement perpetrated by characters whose purpose is essentially to mess with our minds, torture us with ideas, demand that we think.

And, having forced us to listen, Hnath’s play sends us out into the world still struggling with its perplexities.

Even without knowing Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House, written in 1879, this is a compelling snapshot of the afterlife of one of realist theatre’s most enduring female protagonists. In it, Hnath imagines what might have happened once Nora walked out of her home, leaving her three children and husband, Torvald, behind.

And then it shows us what transpires when Nora returns, this time with a problem she believes only Torvald can fix.

For Nora, played by a strikingly statuesque Bianca Amato, as someone who is quick-witted and determined to follow her beliefs, 15 years of husbandless independence has given her tremendous vitality.