BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE World Premiere Will Come to the Schwarzman Centre

The Schwarzman Centre and Breach Theatre have announced Burning Down the House, a World Premiere production from the critically acclaimed theatre company behind After the Act (Royal Court Theatre and UK Tour) and It's True It's True It's True (BBC 4) which runs at the Schwarzman Centre in Oxford from 25 September - 10 October 2026 with press night on Thursday 1 October.

Burning Down the House revisits Henrik Ibsen's most renowned and celebrated work, A Doll's House, shifting the focus onto Laura Kieler, the real woman, writer and friend of Ibsen whose life story he rewrote into the character of Nora, without her knowledge or permission. A writer herself, Kieler responded with her own play, Men of Honour. Burning Down the House asks urgent questions about the ethics of biography, the silencing of women, and who is allowed to tell another person's story. In doing so, Breach's new play provides a powerful corrective to the history of A Doll's House and dramatizes one of the most significant acts of literary appropriation of the nineteenth century.

The genesis of Burning Down the House was the research of leading Ibsen expert Kirsten Shepherd, Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and co-editor of A Doll's House, Men of Honour, When We Dead Awaken - Oxford World's Classics. Kirsten, research assistant and co-editor Tzen Sam, and translator Gaye Kynoch have provided Breach with the original research and translated materials, including translations of Laura's play, articles, letters and journals which have inspired the new production, marrying the academic and artistic worlds in a mutually enriching exchange.

Alongside the run of Burning Down the House, there will be a rehearsed reading of Kieler's Men of Honour on Saturday 10 October at 2pm, in what will be the first ever outing of this play in English, newly translated by Gaye Kynoch.

Scandinavia, 1879. Playwright Henrik Ibsen scandalises audiences with A Doll's House, whose heroine Nora walks out on her family.

But to one woman, the story is all too familiar. Laura Kieler, a young writer who had turned to Ibsen for help, finds that he has stolen her harrowing circumstances as the play's raw material. As Ibsen's literary fame ignites, Laura's life falls apart - she must fight to save her reputation and her relationship with her family.

In Burning Down the House, Laura steps out of Nora's shadow and takes a theatrical flamethrower to Ibsen's version of events. 

Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens of Breach said: “We're delighted to be bringing Burning Down the House to the Schwarzman Centre, following such a fruitful collaboration. It feels very vital and right that the production starts its life in Oxford. Laura Kieler's story taps into contemporary conversations surrounding the ethics of storytelling, explores the blurry line between creativity and inspiration and questions who has the right to tell what stories. The subject matter is complicated, murky and thrilling.”

Kirsten Shepherd, Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford said: “As part of my ongoing academic work around Ibsen I have long been fascinated by the story behind A Dolls House, wanting to bring it out of the margins and footnotes of Ibsen studies.  It's a story that I think readers and audiences of Ibsen's plays would find interesting, as well as deeply relevant to our own times.  A major part of the story is Kieler's own subsequent play Men of Honour, her attempt to regain agency over her life and work. I approached Breach to collaborate on making a play about this story because of their impressive catalogue of work that brilliantly interrogates historical representations on stage, through a documentary lens and innovative theatricality.  It felt like the perfect fit to bring this radical, moving and edge-of-your-seat story to the stage. It's been 5 years in the making, and I can't wait to bring their new production of Burning Down The House to the Schwarzman Centre.

One of the questions Ibsen and Kieler both explore in very different ways is what options were available to women at that time. Critics have long discussed Ibsen's contribution to feminist theatre - portraying the problem of narrow roles for women in society repeatedly in his ground-breaking work. And yet, despite writing one of the world's most sensational feminist dramas, Ibsen bristled at being called a feminist. He returned time and again in his work to topics such as the constraints of marriage, motherhood, and femininity, a rich dramatic seam that could be endlessly mined. It is intriguingly, disturbingly ironic that the making of A Doll's House involved the appropriation of a real woman's story, with dire consequences for her and her family for which–despite Laura repeatedly asking him to–he never publicly apologised. 'I am not Nora,' she insisted many times.  Burning Down the House cracks open what she meant by that.”

The devisors/performers include Peter Clements (The Shitheads - Royal Court), Sophie Steer (The Tempest - Shakespeare's Globe), Ellice Stevens (It's True It's True It's True), Jacoba Williams (The Shitheads) and Yasser Zadeh (The Confessions - National Theatre).

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