‘That’s all you have to know’ : Pangdemonium’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 has no need for Part 1

SINGAPORE – Home-grown theatre company Pangdemonium’s new play may be titled A Doll’s House, Part 2, but it never staged part one – and has no immediate plans to.

In fact, A Doll’s House, Part 2 is an entirely separate entity from Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s early feminist classic A Doll’s House (1879). Penned nearly 140 years later, Part 2 is the imagined sequel, written by a different playwright – American Lucas Hnath – and first staged in 2017.

Protagonist Nora was last seen walking out on her family after becoming disillusioned with the way her husband Torvald treats her.

She is now back, 15 years later – “and that’s all you have to know”, assures Singapore director Timothy Koh, 31, who has once more chosen to helm a chamber play of four mature, eloquent characters after successful outings with Doubt: A Parable in 2023 and Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in 2024.

Playing Nora and Torvald are Malaysian actress Jo Kukathas and local actor Lim Kay Siu respectively, who likewise wave away suggestions that one might have to be familiar with Ibsen to watch the Hnath follow-up.

Kukathas, 62, is confident in theatre’s communicative power. “That scene when Nora first sees Torvald and he doesn’t know she’s there, everybody in the audience will recognise: ‘That’s a person who’s seen her ex-husband.’ And then he sees her. All the history is in that look. Everything else is in the play.”

As A Doll’s House’s lesser-known cousin, Part 2’s distinctiveness is in part its scintillating writing – a “choral piece concert”, describes Kukathas, who read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House much earlier and has always loved the character of Nora.

“Now she’s older, gone through some stuff. She’s gone on to make a different life for herself, and she’s come back because she needs something.”

Hnath’s language is rejuvenatingly anachronistic, 21st-century “gonnas” and “sortas” injected into the milieu of late 19th-century Norway. Kukathas compares it with Netflix period hit Bridgerton (2020 to present), another unabashed mash-up of modern sensibilities with corsets and bishop sleeves.

But Lim also praises Hnath’s writing for its specificity and humour. The 69-year-old veteran says he has the “bad habit” of learning lines with a fixed emotion, an approach that makes changes in emotional interpretation later during rehearsals troublesome for memory.

In this process, Hnath’s pedantic lines have both challenged and helped him.

“A dash means how long you take. A gap in the line requires a certain stop,” Lim says. “I did wonder how we were going to explain all that emotional history and I was looking for ways to present the comedy, but I’m more and more convinced that there’s no need. It’s already there.”

Koh says lines aside, Hnath leaves relatively few directorial notes, and the version Kukathas, Lim and fellow actors Neo Swee Lin and Rebecca Ashley Dass are enacting is a completely different beast from the one he watched on Broadway in 2017.

Reading the play has elicited a host of unexpected emotions from the cast. Lim, who has been married 33 years to Neo, found it “unputdownable”, forcing him to question the institution of marriage.

He says: “We both have been through ups and downs and have felt at some point, ‘This is not really working, have we committed to something false?’”

Kukathas found in it echoes of men’s pushback against feminism, saying: “You are so used to getting a bigger piece of the pie that now when you have less pie, you are hungry, but we’ve been hungry for a long time as well, and now we are actually getting to eat.”

As a single woman, it was also a meditation on singlehood.

“What do you lose when you are in a relationship with somebody, and is it worth it? For some people, it is completely worth it, they want to be owned. For other people, it’s hard.”

For Koh, who is much younger, the interest continues to lie in the alchemical joy of putting actors in a room, with no need for pomp and frills.

He also hints at a minimalist set: “I like the challenge of wordiness and I like the challenge of keeping it active. We’ve designed the set to challenge us to make decisions that we wouldn’t make if we could hide more easily.”

Book It/ A Doll’s House, Part 2

Where: Victoria Theatre, 9 Empress Place
When: March 7 to 23, Tuesdays to Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 3 and 8pm; Sundays, 3pm 
Admission: From $30
Info:

pangdemonium.com/whats-on-details/a-dolls-house-part2