What the exam asks
In Paper 2 (25 marks), Criterion B1 (5 marks) rewards you for analysing and evaluating not just small-scale language features, but broader authorial choices: how Ibsen uses structure, setting, stagecraft, character foils and dramatic form to shape meaning. In the HL essay (20 marks), your 1,200–1,500-word argument must investigate the play as a whole rather than commenting on a single scene, making these sustained patterns across all three acts essential to a convincing line of inquiry.
Core ideas
Structure, time and the subverted “well-made play”
Ibsen compresses the action into three acts in a single room (“The action takes place in Helmer’s house”) over about three days:
- Act 1: Christmas Eve daytime (the tree arrives; Torvald Helmer’s promotion at the bank starts in the New Year).
- Act 2: Christmas Day late afternoon into evening (Nora counts down the hours until the fancy-dress party upstairs: “Twenty-four and seven? Thirty-one hours to live.”).
- Act 3: Late the next night (the day after Christmas Day), as the party upstairs ends.
Instead of using a narrator or prologue, Ibsen uses retrospective exposition: the past catches up with the present through dialogue. Nora’s secret loan eight years ago, her father’s death, the trip to Italy, Mrs Linde’s loveless marriage and Krogstad’s history with Mrs Linde all surface organically as characters talk.
Formally, Ibsen borrows the machinery of the French well-made play (pièce bien faite: a tightly plotted popular drama built on a secret, a crisis and a neat ending)—a guilty secret, a blackmailer (Krogstad), a confidante (Mrs Linde), an incriminating letter in a locked letterbox, a key held by the husband, and a frantic distraction (the tarantella)—only to subvert the ending. Where a well-made play ends by resolving the misunderstanding and restoring domestic harmony, Ibsen drops the plot machinery in Act 3 and replaces reconciliation with a stark philosophical discussion.
The set and stage directions as a visual barometer
The living room is never changed for another location, yet Ibsen re-dresses it across the three acts to track the unravelling of Nora’s illusion:
| Act | Stage directions (Sharp’s translation) | Dramatic effect |
|---|---|---|
| Act 1 | “A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly. At the back, a door to the right leads to the entrance-hall, another to the left leads to Helmer’s study. Between the doors stands a piano.” “The floors are carpeted, and a fire burns in the stove. It is winter.” | Warmth, middle-class security and spatial hierarchy: Helmer controls the study door; the hall door connects to the outside world. |
| Act 2 | “THE Christmas Tree is in the corner by the piano, stripped of its ornaments and with burnt-down candle-ends on its dishevelled branches.” | Visualizes Nora’s frayed nerves and the stripping away of her festive domestic disguise. |
| Act 3 | “The table has been placed in the middle of the stage, with chairs around it. A lamp is burning on the table. The door into the hall stands open. Dance music is heard in the room above.” | Sets up a sober space of reckoning and interrogation before the final scene even begins, contrasted with the artificial party music upstairs. |