Pause for a moment. Look at the space around you, the place in which you are reading. What does it look like? What objects surround you? Does this place belong to you? If not, to whom does it belong? Do you identify with it – its objects, their arrangement, their memories? Does this space help to identify who you are? Take a few moments to write about the details of the space where you find yourself. Describe it, and your relationship to it.
In the middle of the introduction I take us to the Young Vic for a brief visit to the final scene of Carrie Cracknell’s 2012 production of A Doll’s House, starring Hattie Morahan and Dominic Rowan. I talk about how important the tiny spaces of Nora’s room and Rowan’s study are to the people these characters represent; I talk about how the objects in the production (and in the written text of Ibsen’s script) fuel our understanding of Nora’s character in particular. Select another performance text you’ve recently encountered: maybe a script you’ve read or a work you’ve seen live. Were objects, or the shapes of spaces, important to the characters’ relationships, or to the way certain characters navigated the story? How? (Hint: if you can’t think of a good recent example, click the Video and Web Resources tab to watch the short film “Nora”, starring Morahan and directed by Cracknell.)
