What does she have?

What is she getting at?

Why this constant irritability?

Not only does the husband of the unruly Nora ask himself this in private, but thanks to the ingenious reversal of sympathy, which only a director as subtle as Rudolf Noelte could dare, the audience in this performance, not just the male ones, asked themselves the same question and liked it shake their heads at the capricious behavior of these first emancipated among female theater figures.

She seems too eccentric, too smug, too frivolous.

And her husband, the deeply trustworthy one, as played by Werner Kreindl, is really no tyrant, no dolt and no woman handicapper.

Anything but a man to leave at all costs.

He remains understanding and concerned, always approachable and at best shows himself a little at a loss when faced with the airs and graces of this (rather clumsy) avant-gardist of female self-determination.

And when he calls her dolly or my lark, the tone is affectionate and not one of derogatory trivialization.

A kind of dialectic trick

The fact that the public's sympathy rests with her husband Torwald Helmer for a good while finally turns out to be theatrical cleverness of a kind that Brecht would be credited with.

And when you finally sort your (joint) feelings, you actually come across a kind of dialectic trick: the so richly orchestrated portrayal of Cordula Trantow, the strangeness of her high-tensioned exaltations, questioned and observed through the empathy with the husband, leaves the viewer at some point all the more attentive and curious about the motives, and in doing so he discovers that the woman is also bribed by the spirit of the times, that is, she is not acting entirely of her own accord.

Now the viewer (of today or then: 1976) recognizes her as the harbinger of a power

So the great melancholic Noelte would have turned the Ibsen drama into a moral lesson?

Unlike the do-gooder Brecht, for the pessimist Noelte there can be no theater of showing and critical distance, only one of heightened empathy and identification, as pure and rich as only the magic of illusion allows.

At the time, people admired the feat of an intimate interdependence between two extraordinary actors in the Berlin Renaissance Theater.

The subtle reversal of perspective only succeeded because Trantow's mastery always kept the act of departure, leaving husband and children, in balance with its deeper dubiousness.

Today she, who is fondly remembered by many, is eighty years old.

Botho Strauss

is one of the best-known playwrights on German stages.

Most recently he published “No more.

Nothing more - ciphers for you" 2021 at Hanser.