'It’s only a play’: Wife (2019), A Doll’s House (1879), and the Relevance of Historical Theatre

Samuel Adamson maintains that his 2019 play Wife is not, strictly speaking, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). In this article, I argue that Wife does in fact adapt formal and structural elements of Ibsen’s nineteenth-century drama to answer some of the questions that have been posed about the play since its first production. In doing so, Wife also provides a model for how modern audiences can productively engage with a historical text, a moment of theatre history. I conclude that the play’s formal structure works alongside its thematic explorations to model audience behaviour. We, “the audience of Wife” referred to repeatedly in the stage directions, are encouraged by the play’s structural pairing of adaptation and post-show discussion to spend time after we have left the theatre thinking further about the intersections of the play we have just seen (and, by extension, of Ibsen’s play) with our own lives, circumstances, and situations.