While reading A Doll’s House, I recalled many occasions where I had heard the translated work of Ibsen spoken or performed, and since I had been used to the text in the context of performance, I thought about the acting choices one would make when portraying one of Ibsen’s characters.  One of the things that truly jumped out to me was the heavy use of subtext – or what the character is actually thinking or feeling but doesn’t say.  Nora is one of the characters with the most apparent subtext.  It is apparent that things are not “okay” in her life from the first scene, yet the playwright chooses to have the character speak lines that would suggest something to the contrary.  These type of plays rooted in subtext are always very interesting to watch, as it is the actor’s choices that truly illuminate the character’s intentions and emotions.

After realizing that today’s assignment was a critical question and not a blog response, I will take what I wrote above and pose it as a question:

How does the subtext that Ibsen and other playwrights utilize in their plays help to tell the story?